Praying for Rain Won’t Be Enough : WATER WATCH: A risky Wilson stance

California’s hired water Establishment and its elected government were eyeball to eyeball over water policy last week. Government blinked.

The confrontation involved a bill to push aside barriers that keep farmers who have more water than they need from selling it to cities, whose water needs keep growing with their populations.

Such a law also would speed the day when sales were routine and smooth and water agencies could avoid the false perception that they have plenty of water gushing forth wastefully.

The bill by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) would permit such sales without approval by the management of irrigation districts that deliver water to farms.

At the request of Gov. Pete Wilson, who is said to favor at least the concept of the bill, Katz spent weeks offering a series of compromise proposals to rural water districts, who were fighting the idea.

The position of the water Establishment started and ended without change: Without a right to veto any such a sale, nothing doing.

In the absence of any public word from the governor, who could probably have tipped the balance, the Katz bill died last week in the Senate Agriculture and Water Committee.

Why did Sacramento blink?

The governor’s office said only that Wilson had some questions about the bill, without specifying what they were. Because it was Wilson who asked Katz to try to reach a compromise, one question must be whether it makes political sense for him to take on the water managers and the farm lobby now.

Wilson, who is preparing a major growth-management plan for the state that will have a water component, may also not have wanted the Legislature to get ahead of him on water policy.

Whatever the reason, letting the bill die was risky. Next year could be as dry as this, draining reservoirs and making sales of water to cities not a convenience but a matter of economic and environmental survival.

It also postpones for a year the tricky transition involved in shifting from a system where water costs are determined by law and custom to one where they reflect water’s value on an open market.

It will take more than one year’s experience with buying and selling water to make the new system work as well as the old. The fact that Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District has full reservoirs while most of the state bakes under rainless skies testifies to the importance of that.

The Met’s reservoirs filled up because the agency scrambled to store enough water to meet even rationed demand, but conservation and cool weather cut its sales by an astounding 38%. The water will not go to waste. The Met has sold 55,000 acre-feet--a 10-day supply in normal years--to local water agencies which will use it to recharge water wells.

Katz’s reform plan will help prevent such frustrating fits and starts by letting water agencies plan further ahead in a new, more logical system. That is yet another good reason for a sense of urgency about passing it.