City Hall Missing the Boat on Water Crisis : Drought: Our elected officials are wasting precious time attacking other agencies, pursuing unworkable solutions and hiding from their responsibilities.

When I accepted an appointment to the San Diego County Water Authority representing the city of San Diego, I assumed the responsibility of helping to insure a safe, reliable and cost-effective supply of water to the people of the city and the county. Little did I realize then that the principal obstacle to fulfilling that responsibility would be the very elected officials who appointed me.

Winter rain may soon arrive, but our city still faces a water crisis of considerable proportions. The fault lies not in our stars or with Mother Nature, but with our elected public officials at City Hall, who ignore the advice of their own experts, pander to popular misconceptions, and pursue expedient policies that display a profound indifference to the economic and political realities of water in the state of California.

Without new and enlightened leadership, San Diegans can look forward to a bleak water future punctuated by shortages, higher prices and a decaying infrastructure--all of which will contribute to economic stagnation and the erosion of our much-vaunted quality of life.

The City Council’s renewed foot-dragging on the water reclamation component of the Clean Water program is but the latest in a long series of decisions that fail to comprehend the broad issues at stake and to offer imaginative solutions. One councilman, who aspires to lead the city in the near future, opined that San Diegans might well abandon these costly reclamation efforts in favor of importing what he called “cheaper” water from agricultural regions in Northern California. Unless this councilman proposes to organize a bucket brigade from the Sacramento Valley to San Diego, his alternative of “cheaper” imported water has no more reality than the tooth fairy.

All of the surplus agricultural water in California will profit San Diegans little unless we have facilities to transport it vast distances and reservoirs in which to store it. That cannot happen without new aqueducts, pipelines, pumps and dams--all of which will cost the people of San Diego and California hundreds of millions of dollars. In the long run, the cost of new imported water from Northern California (assuming its availability) will be about the same as water reclaimed locally through the Clean Water program.

But apart from comparable costs, there is another reason to pursue vigorously a reclaimed water program in San Diego--the safety and reliability of the local water supply. Our existing aqueduct system, which brings 95% of San Diego’s water from Northern California and the Colorado River, remains highly vulnerable to a major earthquake along the active faults on the Riverside-San Diego line. Some cities in the county have little or no storage capacity in the event of such a natural calamity. The city’s reservoirs give us a small margin of safety, but that margin can be improved substantially with the utilization of locally reclaimed water.

The people of San Diego want and deserve water at the lowest possible cost, but they also want and deserve a reliable water supply.

That is why, in addition to supporting the reclamation component of the Clean Water program, the County Water Authority has undertaken a major capital improvement effort and is now studying the feasibility of a combined power-desalination facility with San Diego Gas & Electric. Every acre-foot of locally developed and locally controlled water gives the people of San Diego a greater measure of safety against the day when their imported supplies might be disrupted. These current desalination efforts received enthusiastic support from Assemblyman Steve Peace, Sen. Lucy Killea, and the county Board of Supervisors. Little active encouragement has come from the city’s elected officials, who seem to equate the defense of local autonomy with vituperative attacks on the Metropolitan Water District and the County Water Authority.

Instead of casting aspersions on other institutions, the city’s elected officials should put their own water house in order with respect to rates, capital investment and conservation. Their policies in this regard have been as short-sighted and expedient as those relating to reclamation.

For the third consecutive year, the mayor and City Council have spurned the advice of their own city manager and staff by denying a much-needed rate increase for capital development by the Water Utilities Department. The capital budget of the Water Utilities Department has been cut almost in half since 1989-90, from $40 million to $23 million. Sixteen engineers have been laid off.

The department now lacks the money to comply with the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Meanwhile, sewer lines continue to rot and rupture throughout the city, bringing inconvenience and menacing public health and safety. Major portions of our water system are half a century old.

The city of San Diego now devotes a smaller percentage of its water rate to capital investment than either the Metropolitan Water District or the County Water Authority--only 90 cents out of each $8 it collects on an average monthly water bill. By comparison, the much-maligned MWD spends approximately $4.50 out of every $7.50 on new pipes, pumps, and storage facilities; while the CWA invests $1.28 of the $1.84 it adds to the average monthly water bill in capital projects. Unless these city ratios are changed, unless San Diego’s elected leaders are prepared to bite the bullet on water rates and capital development, the people of San Diego face further deterioration of their water infrastructure.

Finally, the city’s elected leaders have all but abandoned a tiered water rate structure that rewards serious efforts at conservation and penalizes extravagance. In this regard the city has broken ranks with virtually every major jurisdiction in the county and the state of California. We are told that San Diegans are different, that volunteerism here has triumphed, that public-spirited citizens have met their 20% reduction without coercion.

That such self-serving hyperbole might reduce our influence in the high-stakes game of state water politics is not seriously considered. That a mild summer had more to do with water savings than a virtuous citizenry is seldom mentioned. During the first seven days of October, the actual savings reached only 13% in the city. On Oct. 10, when the local temperature hit 78 degrees, the actual savings amounted to 5.2%.

San Diego’s water problems are urgent and complex. They will not go away by shifting blame to MWD or CWA or by placing all water agencies under the control of the state’s Public Utilities Commission. How ironic. Those who beat the drums for local control and grass-roots democracy in the SDG&E; merger battle now advocate that we cede authority over basic water policies to a distant bureaucracy in Sacramento.

The solutions to San Diego’s many-faceted water crisis will require money, sacrifice, imagination, the exercise of political will on the local level and restoring the city’s credibility in the state at large. Thus far, we have been offered only large doses of rhetoric, political posturing before elections, and diversionary tactics designed to deflect responsibility from those who have failed to address them seriously.