Shift in Priorities Means Drought Never Really Ends : Resources: With the environment the big winner, farmers and cities must find ways to ensure adequate water supplies.

It was raining and snowing across much of California, and the governor had pronounced the six-year drought officially dead. But it was business as usual last week for Roy Senior Jr., who drills wells for a living.

Senior and his crew were putting the finishing touches on a well sunk half a mile beneath Harris Farms, a sprawling vegetable and cattle ranch straddling Interstate 5 midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Drought or no drought, Harris needs more water. And the story is the same on big and small farms throughout much of the San Joaquin Valley, where Senior has 10 more wells to dig before spring.

“Even though the hydrological drought may be over, the regulatory drought continues with a vengeance,” said Harris’ business manager, Erick Johnson. “We’ve only been able to survive by using water from wells.”

Court rulings, a barrage of new laws and regulations and the state’s continued population explosion have conspired to ensure that post-drought California will be very different from the California of only a few years ago.

Harris Farms and its neighbors have been advised to expect only one-quarter of the water they received before the drought from the largest water delivery system in the state. Even without the protracted dry spell, operators of the system say the outlook will improve little because of new environmental restrictions on the distribution of water.

Although the parched environment may have been the biggest loser during the drought, it is shaping up as the biggest post-drought winner. Requirements of the federal Endangered Species Act have virtually ensured that enough fresh water remains in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to protect salmon that were almost wiped out in recent years.

Agriculture is likely to bear the brunt of the changing water priorities, but the lessons of the drought will also come to bear on city residents--hitting them most notably in their wallets. The water outlook for cities is not one of assured abundance, despite brimming reservoirs and official pronouncements of plentiful supplies this year.

The drought has served as a reminder to urban water agencies that Mother Nature can be capricious, that there often will be less water when it is most needed and that even the best-laid plans may not cushion the blow of the next dry spell. As cities step up the search for more water, from encouraging conservation to constructing reservoirs, residential water bills will inevitably rise.

“All of the cheap water sources have been found,” said Bert Becker of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which plans to build a $1.5-billion reservoir in Riverside County to collect more rainfall. “Anything new we find will be expensive.”

The average water bill in the city of Los Angeles has doubled during the past six years, and water bureaucrats say they will be asking for more. The MWD, a wholesaler that supplies about half the water to Southern California, is planning a 22% rate increase this year.

“The drought has acted like the federal deficit by making us aware of the enormity of our water problem, that we are deficit spending in water,” said Marc Reisner, who has written extensively about the state’s water problems.

After the state emerged from its last drought in 1977 on the heels of a comparable winter deluge, it was not long before attention turned to constructing water delivery facilities in Northern California to better funnel exports to farms and cities in the south.

About two-thirds of the state’s drinking water passes through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta before reaching state and federal pumps there. It was believed that building the Peripheral Canal--a waterway that would carry Sierra Nevada runoff from the Sacramento River Valley to the export pumps--would guarantee plentiful supplies for most of the state while addressing some environmental concerns about pumping damage to the estuary.

The Peripheral Canal proposal was approved by the Legislature but rejected overwhelmingly at the polls in 1982. Many Northern Californians and environmentalists feared that Southern California’s apparent unquenchable thirst would drain their streams bone dry, while some wealthy farmers also opposed it because they believed that accompanying environmental restrictions went too far.

A decade and another dry spell later, interest in a peripheral canal has resurfaced, particularly at the MWD and other large water agencies worried about reliability of supplies. A new federal law passed last fall and a state plan to protect fish and wildlife in the delta could divert 2-million acre-feet of water a year from farms and cities--the equivalent of a three-year supply for the city of Los Angeles.

Gov. Pete Wilson has appointed a committee, with representatives from farms, cities and environmental groups, to study the delta and come up with a proposal to solve its water delivery and environmental problems. A canal is among the options to be reviewed, though it is still vehemently opposed by many of those who sank it last time.

“The drought has pointed out that we need to work on our overall state water system,” said Maurice Roos, the state’s chief hydrologist. “Otherwise, the next dry spell will come up and it will be the same old story again--or maybe worse because there will be more people here.”

But things have changed since 1982. This time around, even many of the strongest proponents of the Peripheral Canal do not embrace it as a panacea for water shortages, but as one piece in an increasingly complex puzzle.

Most urban water agencies have developed permanent water conservation programs that cut water use by as much as 20%. Millions of dollars are being spent on water reclamation programs, which in essence recycle water once discarded in sewers. And there is a renewed push in Sacramento to change laws to make it easier for cities to buy water from farmers, some of whom during dry spells may find it more profitable to market their water than using it to grow crops.

“The competition for water is increasing, but the main lesson that one needs to learn from the drought is not that everybody needs to make do with less, but that we need to value water more than we have valued it in the past,” said Tom Graff, senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund in Oakland. “We can’t just give water away.”

In the minds of Graff and others, giving water away means supplying agriculture, and to a lesser degree, cities, at the expense of streams and rivers. But farmers, who use eight of every 10 gallons of water in the state, are not giving up without a fight. They have threatened a court challenge to the proposed environmental regulations for the delta, while getting by for now by drilling deeper into ground-water supplies.

In the short term, post-drought California may be marked by exploding tensions between farmers and their adversaries in cities and environmental groups, while their proxies on the governor’s committee try to come up with a water strategy.

“It really doesn’t seem fair,” said farmer Gary Robinson, speaking on a cellular phone while working in his almond orchard near the town of Huron in Fresno County. “We are growing food and fiber for those of you in the cities. But we can’t grow food unless we get water.”