DWP Signs Deal With Inyo County on Water Rights : Owens Valley: The agreement will end 19 years of litigation. Pact will cost Los Angeles millions, but the agency will be able to estimate annual exports.

Seeking to end 19 years of litigation, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Tuesday signed an agreement with the Inyo County Board of Supervisors that confirms the city’s vast water rights in the Owens Valley but also regulates the amount of water that can be pumped out of the region.

In a unanimous vote of the DWP commissioners, which was delayed several hours while they waited for Inyo County supervisors to deliberate and adopt the document, the two agencies settled one of the city’s longest and most bitter legal tangles since the aqueduct to the Owens Valley was built in 1913, according to Chief Assistant City Atty. Ed Ferrell.

“This sets a new direction for environmental resources management,” DWP board President Mike Gage said about the historic agreement.

Officials said it will cost the city millions of dollars a year and tens of millions in one-time costs. But DWP Commissioner Rick Caruso said, “It gives the (DWP) the ability to predict annually how much water we can export from the valley. . . .”

The agreement, he said, also ends the challenges to Los Angeles’ water rights that began soon after the city purchased its enormous tracts of land in the Eastern Sierra Nevada early in the century.

The agreement, which must be ratified by the City Council in a vote scheduled for Friday, comes after nearly a decade of negotiations and two years after a preliminary agreement was reached.

“It fundamentally says we can export as much water as we want, as long as we don’t cause any environmental damage,” said James Wickser, DWP assistant general manager for water.

Inyo County supervisors approved the agreement in a 5-0 vote. Supervisor Bob Campbell said, “The bottom line is we established a relationship with the DWP that will protect the environment of the Owens Valley. . . . The money was secondary.”

Noting that the conflict with Inyo County and the city of Los Angeles covers almost eight decades and included vigilante action against DWP facilities, Campbell said the agreement “puts it all behind us now.”

The agreement requires Los Angeles to pay Inyo County about $2 million a year to help mitigate some earlier environmental damage and offset the low tax assessments on DWP-owned land in the area, officials said.

It also requires the city to spend more than $10 million to re-establish a trout fishery in nearly 50 miles of the Lower Owens River and fund construction of other recreational facilities, briefing papers said.

The DWP is also required to transfer water systems to Inyo County that it operates in the towns of Laws, Independence, Lone Pine and Big Pine. The agreement sets the sales price at $1 each.

As part of the agreement, Inyo County drops its challenges to Los Angeles’ water rights in the area and ends its quest to assess higher taxes on the city’s land holdings. The agreement allows the DWP to pump more ground water than is allowed under an interim court order.

The exporting of water from the Owens Valley has turned the former farming region into a desolate high desert environment. Sagebrush has replaced once-vibrant wetlands, and alkali dust blows off the flatlands that were once the bed of Owens Lake, which has been dry since 1940. The Owens River has been reduced to a small stream in places.

The litigation began in 1972, shortly after the DWP completed construction of its second Owens Valley aqueduct and began pumping ground water from the area.

The second aqueduct allowed the city to increase by about 50% the amount of water exported from the Owens Valley. Depending on rainfall and snowpack in the region, the city annually takes several hundred thousand acre-feet of water--enough to serve at least half of the city’s water needs.

Inyo County sued the DWP, demanding that an environmental impact statement be prepared regarding its expanded ground water pumping. Before the second aqueduct, the city primarily exported surface water from the Owens River.

The DWP lost the first few rounds in court but the issue was still unresolved in 1980, when Inyo County voters approved an ordinance limiting ground water pumping. The DWP sued Inyo County in 1982, seeking to overturn the ordinance.

In 1984, the two parties began settlement talks and in 1989 a preliminary agreement was adopted. Both sides have been living by the essential terms of the agreement since then, while the final legal language was drafted.