Water Fight Could Topple Influential Farmers’ Advocate : Politics: Champion of Southern California’s agriculture industry battles community activist to retain long-held post in Rainbow water district.

Who would have thought that a pipsqueak political water fight in a place named Rainbow would have ramifications that could literally wash over all of Southern California?

On its face, the issues in next month’s election in the rural Rainbow Municipal Water District--78 square miles of estate homes, ranches and groves in North County--are parochial enough.

An upstart community activist is accusing the incumbent of being a good old boy who has lost sight of his own 12,000 constituents. Armed with some aging political dirt, and complaining that his opponent has allowed water rates to shoot up like some geyser, the challenger is out to topple the incumbent.

But in this case, the incumbent wears another hat--as one of the most influential directors of the world’s largest water agency, the Metropolitan Water District. The MWD is the wholesaler of imported water to 15 million Southern Californians from Ventura to the Mexican border and inland to Riverside.

As one of the board’s 51 directors, retired businessman-turned-gentleman farmer Herb Stickney is roundly regarded as the most passionate and preeminent champion of the Southern California farmers’ fight to be guaranteed water so this desert can bloom with oranges and avocados, strawberries and flowers. If he loses Rainbow, he would forfeit his seat of power on MWD.

But wanna-be director Davis Roach says that isn’t reason to canonize Stickney.

Stickney is credited with persuading the urbanites from the Los Angeles delegation that farmers--San Diego County farmers--shouldn’t have to beg for water like second-class citizens. After years of fundamental opposition to that philosophy, the Los Angeles delegates to the MWD finally conceded the point in April and agreed in concept to make changes.

Currently, farmers are allowed to buy only surplus water. They worry that in drought years, their crops could be allowed to shrivel up as some expendable afterthought to the region’s economy. In San Diego, where more than 90% of the water comes from the MWD, local farmers use less than 10% of it--yet lay claim as the county’s third-largest industry.

The next issue to be resolved is whether farmers should pay full price for their water, or continue to receive a 20% discount. Stickney figures to mediate that compromise, too, and the current thinking is that farmers will pay full price for their water, in exchange for having a guaranteed right to it.

“I bet (Ross) Perot would like him,” said outgoing MWD chairwoman Lois Kreiger of Riverside. “He is not familiar with the politics of things, but he is so strong that he was able to get (Los Angeles’) recognition of agriculture as an important element in Southern California. . . . There is no question that San Diego is best served by him.”

Stickney carries such influence on the MWD board, in fact, that some fellow directors asked him to serve as chairman. Stickney declined, saying he didn’t want to make the drive to Los Angeles as often as that would entail.

Already, Stickney is vice chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority and is expected to be elected its chairman in January. It is through the Rainbow post that Stickney serves on the county board, and through that position that he sits on the MWD board.

Unless, that is, Davis Roach spoils everything for him.

“Before Herb can claim a great deal of credit on the MWD level, he has to, and should have done, a good service as a director of the local district where he is elected to serve,” Roach said.

He accuses Stickney of trying to erode the rural ambience of the area by promoting the extension of sewer services to homes that now get by with individual septic tanks.

“If you bring sewers into an area like this, you automatically promote growth,” Roach said. “With that come the builders.”

Stickney also stood to profit financially by the sewers because they would have increased property values of his home and 5 1/2 acres of oranges as well, Roach said. It took intervention by the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission in 1990, Roach said, to ban Stickney from participating in the sewer discussions.

Roach complains that Stickney acted belatedly when learning that a previous general manager of the Rainbow water district was overpaid $21,000 in salary over two years. Stickney learned about the salary overpayment in January, 1989 but did nothing about it even after the information was publicly released in October, 1990, Roach argues.

The candidate cites a lawsuit against the Rainbow district by one of its former accountants, claiming she was wrongfully terminated after blowing the whistle on the general manager’s overpayments.

In her lawsuit, Gloria Marsh alleged that Stickney “screamed . . . and verbally attacked” her for revealing the discrepancies because, Stickney said that, if anything, the general manager “had even more money coming to him.”

Finally, Roach complains that water costs in the Rainbow district--which is 85% agricultural--have increased “excessively” under Stickney’s reign.

Stickney was appointed to the five-member Rainbow water board in 1985 and elected on his own right in 1988. To each accusation he says he has an answer.

Providing sewers to property owners who want them, Stickney said, has nothing to do with destroying rural ambience or promoting growth. “Planning should be done by planning commissions. Utilities are service districts. Growth is not created by infrastructure.

“A utility is to serve people. If a person has a home on 2 1/2 acres and finds he can’t (accommodate) a septic tank, then why shouldn’t a utility serve him with sewers, once the other land-use zoning requirements have been met?”

Stickney offers documents showing that he requested the Fair Political Practices Commission ruling to clarify whether he could discuss the sewer issue, given the proximity of the proposed sewer line to his own home.

And after he learned that the former general manager was overpaid salary, Stickney said, he didn’t personally dog the issue for a year because the board president--himself an accountant--was supposedly dealing with it.

Besides, he contends, it was the accountant who was responsible for the overpayment in the first place because she used a wrong formula in breaking down the executive’s annual salary into biweekly paychecks. Furthermore, he contends, the accountant repeated that same error when the next general manager was hired--and that it was she, not he, who lost temper when the matter was raised.

And Stickney said that while water rates have gone up in his district, most of that increase was due to the cost of water from the MWD and that the Rainbow water rates are still among the lowest in San Diego County.

So goes the political debate, back and forth, between two men of remarkably similar backgrounds.

Stickney, 74, was a controller for nine Sears & Roebuck stores by the age of 23 and worked as an auditor of confidential funds for the U.S. Army’s counterintelligence corps in Europe during World War II.

Versed in accounting and auditing, he earned a law degree from the University of Florida but embarked, instead, on a career in finance. He was a manager for Dole Pineapple tomato-processing plants in Italy, and was involved in starting up several companies: a private think-tank that prepared financial analyses and position papers; a company that made solid-fuel rockets that later was sold to Lockheed Propulsion, and his own adhesives company that he said was his only business flop.

He retired in 1978 as vice president of finance and service for Kal Kan Foods, and moved with his wife to Fallbrook from the coastal Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades. They bought the home of another Rainbow water district director who enticed him to serve the district as well.

He said he was predisposed to public service and specifically impressed by the level of devotion water board members applied to their posts. When he ran for his first election in 1988, he was unopposed.

Since then, Stickney has been applauded by various North County activists for his role in trying to block the development of landfills in Fallbrook and nearby Pala. Stickney railed against the landfills and enlisted the backing of the County Water Authority because of his fear that the garbage dumps would taint the aquifers alongside the Santa Margarita and San Luis Rey rivers and jeopardize the structural stability of the MWD’s aqueduct lines as they enter San Diego County, literally alongside the proposed dump sites.

Roach, 61, graduated with a history degree from Princeton University and, like Stickney, holds a law degree. Again like Stickney, law played second fiddle to business in Roach’s life. He went back to school, earned a master’s degree in business from the University of Missouri and set off on a career as a trust officer for small banks in Kansas City, Mo.

Paralleling Stickney still, Roach and his wife moved first to Los Angeles and then to Fallbrook four years ago for retirement.

His first taste of public involvement came as he, like Stickney, fought the development of landfills in Fallbrook and Pala. He became a fixture at community meetings where the landfill was debated, and soon enough was finding currency in newspapers as a quotable community activist.

Fueled by his growing interest in community affairs, Roach said he started monitoring Rainbow water district meetings, lured by rumors that its directors were talking of installing sewers in his neighborhood. He rebelled against them, and served on an informal “citizens’ watchdog committee” that first alleged publicly that the general manager of the district had been overpaid.

One member of the Rainbow board is appointed to serve on the 34-member County Water Authority which, in turn, sends six representatives to the MWD, making the San Diego delegation the second largest, behind Los Angeles’.

Mike Madigan, chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority, said Stickney brings to the local board a strong agricultural perspective that would otherwise be lacking.

“San Diego is the largest user of agricultural water of any of the Met (MWD) agencies, and we look to Herb for leadership on those issues, as does the entire Met board,” Madigan said.

“If you lose your voice for agriculture on the Met board, that has a negative impact on agriculture. You have lost the voice and the experience of someone of Herb’s stature, who knows how to get things done at the Met,” Madigan said. “That isn’t to say that the water authority couldn’t start over and appoint someone else, but in Herb you already have somebody who is there, carrying the message with credibility.

“He is most effective when he takes someone out in the hall, one-on-one, and buttonholes him,” Madigan said of Stickney’s political style. “He is like a bulldog. He won’t let go.”

Tim Brick, an MWD representative from Pasadena, talks of how Stickney “is pretty good at dropping emotional hand-grenades into debates” on issues that engage him. When Stickney, for instance, argued successfully that the MWD should place environmental safety engineers at its water treatment plants, he went into some detail about the horrors of chlorine gas poisoning.

Perhaps Stickney’s biggest political coup was in talking fellow MWD directors into supporting a bill by state Assemblyman David G. Kelley (R-Hemet) to reclassify agriculture water as equally beneficial as municipal and industrial water. Historically, most members of the MWD had relegated agricultural water needs as secondary to industrial and domestic use.

It was in campaigning for MWD support for the Kelley bill that Stickney finally softened the Los Angeles delegation’s view of agricultural water.

“He is no flake. He articulates the issues very succinctly,” Kelley said. “And he gets frustrated if it is not understood.”

Indeed. The Kelley bill died in the state Senate committee on agriculture and water resources, chaired by Sen. Ruben Ayala (D-Chino).

Ayala said Stickney spoke well for his position, “but he couldn’t convince me. Later on, I understand, he bad-mouthed me, but that’s OK. I’m accustomed to that.”

It is Stickney’s persistence for agriculture that wins him friends in the industry, said Charles Wolk, a farm and grove manager who serves as director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau and a member of the California Avocado Commission.

“Those guys get worn out at the Met (MWD) because as soon as they start talking about agriculture, they get beat up,” Wolk said.

If Stickney loses his reelection bid, “the next person who goes from San Diego County to that board might not be as committed to agriculture, and have the passion that Herb has,” Wolk said.

Alf Brandt, an MWD representative for Los Angeles and frequently a Stickney adversary, concedes that if Stickney loses, San Diego County might be hard pressed to find a replacement with equal passion.

“He has been the point-man for San Diego,” he said. “I think someone else from San Diego could take up the battle, but Herb has been a long-term fighter on the board, and he has developed some credibility over the years for consistently having worked on the issue.”

Roach said he would gladly fill Stickney’s shoes and carry agriculture’s torch if asked to serve on a regional water board.

“I can’t conceive of any director who would neglect advocating good agricultural policies for this area,” Roach said. “And now that (the water compromise) has been struck by Herb, maybe we should consider other aspects of his service.” Nobody, Roach said, is indispensable.

For his part, Stickney could still be appointed by the Rainbow water board to represent it at the County Water Authority--and then serve as its chairman, and serve as its representative on the MWD.

But Stickney said that, if he loses his reelection, he is out of the water business.

“I am not irreplaceable,” Stickney said. “But I have a passion for this. I know when a battle can be fought. It’s fun. But if the people don’t want me on the local board, I’ll get the message.”