Don’t Let All This Rain Fool You : WATER WATCH: Go for the federal compromise fast

California agriculture accounts directly and indirectly for 10% of the state economy. But it dictates how about 80% of the state’s water is used.

Late this month a U.S. Senate committee will move to shift the power over such vast amounts of water from irrigation districts to the dictates of the free market.

Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is getting ready to send to the Senate floor a bill to transfer from federal to California law the policy that controls allocation of 8 million acre-feet of water.

Under California law as amended in recent years, water can be bought and sold like any other commodity. That allows water to move to enterprises that can use it most efficiently.

WATER BACKUP: Under longstanding and archaic federal law, nearly all of the Central Valley Project’s millions of acre-feet must be used not only to irrigate crops but to irrigate them in the San Joaquin Valley. On average, an acre-foot of irrigation water produces $400 worth of crops. On average, the same amount of water in an urban area adds $500,000 to the economy.

In these times of high unemployment it is crucial to note that an acre-foot provides jobs for eight people on farms; the same acre-foot supports 17,000 people in high-technology industries--statistics that would make a free market weep.

Last year, in the first wobbly steps toward establishing a free market in water, Sacramento bought 830,000 acre-feet of water from farmers who had more than they needed for irrigation. It would take a $3-billion dam to scrape together that much water for parched urban areas. In these hard times, the state just doesn’t have the price of a new dam.

Thus in terms of California’s future, the bill is a ship about to sail, one that Californians from Gov. Pete Wilson and Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) on down would do well to climb aboard.

WATER SOLUTION: Co-sponsored by Sens. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), the bill that Johnston is preparing to move can go a long way toward easing the impact of the California drought.

Winter storms that have soaked Southern California this year have barely dented the drought. Flooding made rescue operations necessary in the Sepulveda Basin Monday, but major reservoirs--most of them in the drier north--are only slightly more than half as full as normal. Flows in the Sacramento River basin, which supplies both federal and state water projects, are less than half of normal.

Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), House Interior Committee chairman, warns that “1992 could be the driest year on record.” The warning is in a letter to Wilson asking him to withdraw his request that Johnston do nothing on the Bradley-Cranston bill for three years.

Wilson said he thinks that months of discussions among environmentalists, farming interests and water district managers are making headway. He said he does not want a federal bill barging in and disrupting the talks.

But the talks have yet to produce anything approaching consensus on environmental protection. Farmers and water district managers resist leaving as much water in northern rivers as environmental groups say is needed to protect fish, waterfowl and the natural environment generally.

Bradley’s bill calls for reasonable limits on pumping water. He and Johnston are said to be prepared to incorporate some of what Seymour thinks is important in his competing water bill. With state reservoirs in their sorry state, drought damage to habitat already grave and growing and the odds favoring a sixth year of drought, it is time to bargain. It is also time for Wilson, Seymour, water managers--including Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District--and business to get behind the compromise Johnston bill. The stakes are far too high to do otherwise.