NEWS ANALYSIS : Agriculture Loses Ground in New Era of Water Wars : Resources: Cities and environmentalists now have the clout. The north-south battle lines no longer apply.

At first glance, it looked like any other reception at the prestigious Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Crowded into a meeting room overlooking Market Street, prominent Northern Californians sipped wine and nibbled salmon and vegetable pate.

But this gathering was different.

Sprinkled among the upstate luminaries were unlikely faces from south of the Tehachapi Mountains. Among them, top officials from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the water-guzzling behemoth that for a generation of northerners has symbolized all that is wrong with the sponge of a megalopolis to the south.

Their presence at the reception, rubbing elbows with longtime archfoes in the environmental movement and Northern California politics, marked a historic shift in the geography of the state’s legendary north-south water wars.

Consider the purpose of the Commonwealth Club event late last year: to honor Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) for a landmark law that diverts a huge amount of water in California to environmental uses. Not too far in the past, this was an issue sure to spark heated exchanges between north and south.

But in the new order of water politics, urbanites at both ends of the state have joined ranks to do battle against a newfound adversary. Thirsty coastal cities have set their sights on the water used to irrigate the state’s vast agricultural expanses, where eight out of every 10 gallons of water go.

“There is a new division in the water wars of California,” said Mike McGill of the Bay Area Economic Forum, a sponsor of the gathering. “Instead of north versus south, it has become east versus west.”

This new geography results from a crucial shift in loyalties. For the first time in decades of recurring water rivalries, the state’s largest urban areas have aligned with environmentalists, their traditional nemesis.

Their partnership is driven less by mutual admiration than by coinciding self-interest.

Cities and environmentalists want more water in a state where population growth, political obstacles and nature dictate a future of water scarcity. And they covet the water traditionally set aside for farmers.

This new coalition’s first major triumph, the Miller-Bradley law passed last fall, sets aside 800,000 acre-feet of water annually--more than Los Angeles and San Francisco together use in a year--to help fish and wildlife. The law also changed the rules to let cities buy federal water from farmers.

“It has become a water reallocation battle,” said Jason Peltier, manager of the Central Valley Project Assn., which represents customers, most of them agricultural, of the largest water project in the state. “The drought has shown us the future. And the future is very painful because there is not enough water to go around.”

Agriculture Left Out in the Cold

The potential implications of the new order are widespread. Streams and estuaries, robbed of water for decades, could get enough new flows for ailing ecosystems to begin recovery. Growing cities may get more reliable water supplies, while agriculture may face an era of diminished influence and importance.

“The change is fundamental, far-reaching and truly of historic proportion,” said Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento), a leading Northern California legislator on water issues. “It probably does more to rationalize the water debate than anything else in 70 years in California.”

Through decades of on-again off-again conflicts, two pieces of the state’s water equation were close to immutable. First, the north opposed any efforts to send water south. Second, the Metropolitan Water District, the largest and most powerful urban agency, was inextricably wedded to big agriculture--both sharing a thirst for more water from the north.

Those truths ensured that north would battle south on virtually every major water issue, from a divisive referendum in 1960 that allowed construction of the State Water Project to a bitter fight in 1982 that led to defeat of a plan to build a peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to move water south.

Regional antagonisms ran so deep that some television commercials in the 1982 campaign featured gangsters warning voters not to allow Southern California to pull a water heist on the north. After the measure’s defeat, The Times published a cartoon by Paul Conrad depicting a man in Northern California urinating on the south.

The undoing of the old truths was hastened by the evolution of the Miller-Bradley legislation over the past several years. The new law changes a half-century of policies that had ensured farmers more than 90% of water from the federal Central Valley Project. For the first time, the law places fish and wildlife preservation on a par with agricultural and urban needs in divvying up the federal water.

Farmers and their advocates--including Gov. Pete Wilson and former Sen. John Seymour--fought the legislation. But in a significant break in the old ranks, the MWD sided with environmentalists to support the bill.

MWD General Manager Carl Boronkay, one of agriculture’s most dependable allies for the better part of a decade, said he had no choice.

“If you stop and look at the success of that (old) alliance since 1960, there hasn’t been any,” Boronkay said. “We had been on the losing end of all efforts to do anything about building new (water) facilities, and yet you are faced with the fact that demand is growing like hell. . . . You look around you and say: ‘Who is using the water?’ Well, agriculture uses 80%, so there was no alternative but to tap into it.”

As relations between farmers and Southern California were collapsing, fundamental changes began occurring in the north. Due in large part to the worst drought in a century, business interests in places such as Silicon Valley became active in water issues for the first time.

Faced with an uncertain water supply, fast-growing companies threatened to leave the state or suspend expansion plans. Suddenly, the nettlesome problems of Southern California’s thirst did not seem so far removed from San Jose or Sunnyvale.

“The business community in Northern California woke up and said: ‘We have a problem,’ ” said McGill of the Bay Area Economic Forum. “In the past, they had always said that water was an issue between northern environmentalists and southern development interests.”

Then Silicon Valley leaders began “getting calls from people who wanted to build a chip processing plant, which is water intensive,” McGill said. “They asked if they could be guaranteed sufficient water. The answer had to be no.”

Soon McGill’s group joined the environmentalists lobbying for the Miller-Bradley legislation. Business saw a provision that allows farmers to sell water to urban customers as its best hope for securing future supplies.

By the time the victory party was held at the Commonwealth Club in December, the new coalition had come to include a mosaic of interests, ranging from Transamerica Corp. and Southern California Edison to the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club.

“It is an exciting if sometimes traumatic time,” said Michael Gage, chairman of the MWD board and former commission president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “You can see these coalitions and alliances changing before your eyes.”

The Miller-Bradley legislation provides the most dramatic evidence of the changes, but it was not the first indication that California’s water politics were moving toward a new era.

Three years ago the heads of the state’s major urban water agencies quietly set up their own trade group, led by Boronkay and Jerry Gilbert of the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland. They excluded agricultural water agencies, a clear indication that cities were seeking a new direction.

“It started by two guys saying: ‘Why are we fighting?’ and has grown into something quite valuable,” said Anson Moran, general manager of Hetch Hetchy Water & Power in San Francisco.

Another significant break with agriculture came when cities united behind a 1991 move in the Legislature to make it easier to buy water from farmers. Fearing the demise of agriculture, big irrigation districts and growers opposed giving farmers control over water sales. They defeated the bill with help from Wilson.

Last month, in another sign of the new order, the MWD and other major urban water interests said for the first time that they may support a state proposal to devote more water to the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Irrigation districts oppose the state’s plan, which will be voted on next month.

The delta is the key transfer point for water that is collected in Northern California and shipped south. A number of wildlife species in the delta have declined, in part because of the natural estuary’s long use as a makeshift water project.

“This is a substantial shift of position from where the MWD used to be,” said Tom Graff, senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund in Oakland and a critic of past Southern California water practices. “It is getting harder to just call it ‘The Big Bad South’ anymore.”

Even so, many environmentalists and northerners remain suspicious of their newfound partners in Southern California. Most Northern Californians remain adamantly opposed to building waterworks in the delta, but the MWD continues to hint that new construction may be the best answer to the agency’s needs.

Contra Costa County Supervisor Sunne Wright McPeak, a past critic of Southern California who has helped nurture the new friendliness, said any bid by the MWD to push for delta facilities could revive the old north-south water divide.

“These coalitions are still forming and could break down in any crisis--and are likely to break down if any one side thinks they can get what they want without cooperation,” McPeak said. “That is power politics.”

Public Still Provincial

A return to the bitter north-south battles of the past is not difficult to imagine, McPeak and others said, because the recent rapprochement at the official level has done little to influence public opinion in Northern or Southern California.

Many Northern Californians still complain about water-wasteful Southern Californians. “If you had a vote today to send water from north to south, you wouldn’t get any more votes than in 1982,” said Gerald Meral, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League in Sacramento.

Old attitudes die hard in the south, too.

Many Southern Californians still resent efforts by the north to limit southbound water flows from the Sierra Nevada, even though many northerners depend on the same mountain sources. “There is still a fairly provincial view in the north that we in the south are the only ones who divert water,” Gage said.

Also, the Los Angeles DWP continues to fight court-ordered restrictions on its collection of water from streams that flow into Mono Lake, the saline Eastern Sierra lake that has sparked skirmishes between Los Angeles and environmental groups. The position hurts the city’s image in Northern California, where “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers are a common sight.

So is the new order likely to last?

Graff and some other water experts say that in these uncertain times, no allegiances are permanent. Urban, agricultural and environmental interests will line up differently depending on the issue, according to that scenario.

Isenberg and others say the new order is not that fragile. Realignment of the state’s water interests will be long lasting because the underlying causes of the shift are unlikely to change, they say.

Gage of the MWD refers to the new arrangement as an “uneasy detente” similar to that between the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. He suggests the detente will eventually embrace farmers as well, bringing an end to the water wars.

If the recent gathering at the Commonwealth Club is any indication, however, there is scant cause for such optimism: Gage was there, but not a single farmer was among the 300 guests.

* The Water Wars California’s biggest water fights have historically been viewed as clashes between north and south. But now the battleground has shifted, with cities at both ends of the state aligned with environmental groups to face off against farming interests. A new law diverts more water to the environment. CITIES * As California’s urban population grows, cities are under pressure to find new sources of water. Many have concluded that environmental needs must be addressed to protect water supplies. They also covet the water now used on farms, where eight of every 10 gallons go. “You can see these coalitions and alliances changing before your eyes.” --Michael Gage, Metropolitan Water District board FARMS * Long allied with powerful Southern California water interests, agriculture is increasingly alone in the political fights over water. Trying to hold onto its dominant share of the state’s water, farmers resisted historic reforms that Congress approved last year. “The drought has shown us the future. And the future is very painful because there is not enough water to go around.” --Jason Peltier, manager of Central Valley Project Assn. ENVIRONMENTALISTS * Empowered by court and regulatory victories that require more water for nature, environmental groups have welcomed more cooperation with urban interests. Together they have broken down the traditional political strength of agribusiness on water issues. “Environmental issues matter politically, and they are broad concerns of the public. (They) have to be addressed.” --Tom Graff, senior attorney, Environmental Defense Fund