The Water Power Elite : WATER WATCH: Ignoring the public interest

A Berkeley think tank concludes that managers of California’s state and federal water delivery systems made the current drought more severe than it needed to be. Hoping for a break in the weather, the report says, the managers blithely drained reservoirs well into the fifth year of the dry spell. That exacerbated damage to fisheries around the state. A number of forests took a dreadful beating, the report said, with 60% of the trees in some dead or dying.

The conclusion, prepared by the Pacific Institute for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is similar to a report by Times writer Virginia Ellis last May, with one serious exception:

The think tank says California is so hapless and inept when it comes to water matters that it probably will repeat the mistakes every chance it gets.

If California leadership was for some reason to back away from water policy changes that are already in place or in process, the institute might have a sobering point. But so far there is no sign of that.

MOVEMENT: Stiff water rationing, the specter of industry packing up and leaving the state and the close look at the imbalances in water allocation have left their mark. Legislation, federal and state, is working its way toward fundamental change in the way California’s 35 million acre-feet of deliverable water are divided up each year.

That legislation would help break up a pattern of interlocking interests among water managers who in a very real sense were not accountable to anybody during the early years of the drought. They went along with rural agencies that wanted a steady flow to farms and to urban agencies trying to avoid cuts to homes and factories.

This cliquish process must be opened up. The public must have a stronger voice in water decisions. The water problem will not be overcome without public involvement and support.

Fortunately, top leaders are aware that changes must be made. Gov. Pete Wilson, to buffer California against future droughts, proposes to reallocate water by encouraging buying and selling of water on a relatively free market, as if it was any other valuable resource. In a parallel effort to expand the amount of federal water for sale and purchase, a bill by Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) would require the federal government’s Central Valley Project, which delivers 8 million acre-feet of water a year, mostly to farms in the San Joaquin Valley, to follow California’s more progressive water laws.

A bill by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) would help make water more easily transferable by giving individual farmers a right to sell water, whether or not officials of their irrigation districts approved.

The Bradley bill not only would allow sale of federal water supplies, it would require water agencies to leave enough in rivers, wilderness areas and the natural environment generally to protect them from drought damage.

Adding market incentives to the process of deciding where water can be used most beneficially will help avoid future waste of a resource that will be ever more scarce as California’s population grows. But even with the best water laws, in drought years it will be impossible to avoid hard judgments about when to hold water back and when to let it go.

THE IMPEDIMENT: One way to ensure that such decisions are made in the broadest possible public interest is to expand the state’s existing water advisory machinery. This means major changes, if not a complete make-over, in the state Water Commission, for example. This nine-member panel is dominated by water experts from inside the very group that made the decisions criticized by the Pacific Institute. What California needs are policy bodies that include more members of the public. To crack this water elite, Wilson need only ask the Legislature to amend the law that created the commission.

California has already had a chilling glimpse of a future that simply does not work--one without enough water. Enough’s enough.