A Bank With Unusual Liquidity : WATER WATCH: No way out of California’s drought without a saving plan

Schools don’t abandon fire drills just because students mess up the first time. With so much at stake, they keep at it until the students get it right. The lesson is a perfect fit for water banking in California.

As Times writers Virginia Ellis and Jenifer Warren reported last week, Sacramento’s first attempt to broker sales of surplus water to thirsty farms and cities was not a tidy process.

But the fact is that, learning as they went along, state officials, urban water agencies and a few farmers did manage to store nearly enough water to last Los Angeles a year.

The further fact is the only way that California can hope to survive dry spells for years and perhaps decades to come is through sales and purchases of water on an even larger scale than the state has made this year.

Even if state government were rolling in cash instead of being $15 billion in the hole, the lead time for building new dams or reservoirs to capture more water during the rainy season may well be 20 years. Despite recent drizzle in the south and heavy rain in the north, there may be a sixth year of drought, so even if the state had new reservoirs there would be no water to capture.

In 20 years, even if it builds every reclamation project on the books, Southern California will be 1 million acre-feet short of what its more than 20 million people will need.

Under these grim circumstances, water banking will be not only the least expensive way to make up the shortage but also the only way.

One lesson of the first drought-drill of water banking is that the state needs a process to guarantee fish, wildlife and natural habitat a fair share of any water in the bank.

An important part of the process will be resolving the question of who will pay for it. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) is nearing a final draft of his bill to make part of 7 million acre-feet of federal irrigation water in California available for water banking. He would use the proceeds of a 25% sales tax on water for environmental protection. That tax may be too steep, but the concept can work.

Another thing to remember about water banking is that it is more complicated in practice than it is in theory. Some farmers, accustomed to lower costs, could not afford the asking price for water earlier this year. Some pulled out of deals after the March rains and left the state with expensive water it could not sell.

These are mere glitches compared to the disaster California could face with no water banking at all. The bright side is that the process has begun and the bank holds not only water but some hard-earned lessons as well.