Water District Board Chairman Selling Southland Short : The city’s current representatives back Northern California ideas on restriction of water shipments to the arid south. The mayor should consider changes on the panel.

Now that Mayor Richard Riordan has completed his appointments at City Hall, he should move to protect the public’s interest by replacing Michael Gage, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

MWD is the huge agency that imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River and wholesales it to Southland cities. Besides Los Angeles, the Valley communities of San Fernando, Burbank, and Glendale depend heavily on MWD.

Gage and his supporters on the board are misleading the public about our water problems, which have not gone away with the end of the drought.

To discern this, you had to read between the lines of a May 11 newspaper advertisement in which MWD outlined a multimillion-dollar expansion program to prepare for “future droughts.”

The ad makes Mother Nature the scapegoat for MWD’s costly program, when in fact the fault is man-made.

The true story lies in MWD’s inability to augment its depleted reserves from the surplus water in the northern, wetter part of the state.

Northern Californians mistakenly believe this water belongs to them by right of geography, and they oppose sharing it with the semi-arid south, which relies on imported water for survival.

This antagonism was demonstrated in 1982, when a ballot measure to complete the California Aqueduct by constructing a “peripheral canal” was defeated. As a result, MWD no longer has enough water for projected needs.

Significantly, the May 11 ad appeared soon after the resignation in March of General Manager Carl Boronkay, a strong supporter of the peripheral canal.

Boronkay’s resignation was made inevitable when former Mayor Tom Bradley appointed Gage, his former deputy, to MWD’s board in 1991. Gage was quickly elected board chairman.

Since Los Angeles controls the chair and has the largest voting bloc, eight of the 51 members, by virtue of its size and financial contributions, it can wield tremendous power. Gage demonstrated this in May by influencing the appointment of John Wodraska, a water executive from Florida with environmental experience, to replace Boronkay.

Boronkay’s departure and the choice of an outsider with these credentials has cleared the way for Gage to carry out a pledge to introduce “environmentally correct” policies at MWD. The new policy, as described by Gage and his supporters on the board in press interviews, prohibits the importation of new water from the north and abandons the peripheral canal--a goal long sought by northerners.

Significantly, Gage represented Northern California in the state Assembly before his service in the Bradley Administration.

MWD’s support for this northern philosophy is a cruel blow to Southern California, and a repudiation of state policy that California’s surplus waters belong to all of the people, not just a few.

Southern California has a legitimate right to more northern water. In the early 1960s, MWD contracted with the state for 2 million acre-feet. This is enough water for about 8 million people. Half of this was to be taken when the California Aqueduct was completed, the rest at a future date when the initial allocation was exhausted.

Unbeknown to the public, that critical point was reached in 1990. But the state has been unable to fulfill its obligation without the peripheral canal.

Any attempt by the state to overcome this handicap by installing more powerful pumps at the Tracy Pumping Plant, where water from the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta enters the aqueduct, would draw in seawater from San Francisco Bay and damage the Delta and endanger wildlife.

In the absence of the canal, it is now obvious that the Gage-led MWD will attempt to solve our water problem with what is essentially an expanded conservation program. This is an idea that previous managements had branded as a recipe for permanent water rationing.

The program includes waste-water reclamation, which for health reasons can only be used for irrigation and industrial purposes; improving existing flood control facilities to garner some additional water from local precipitation; constructing a large, new reservoir to double storage capability, and “improving seawater desalination technology,” whatever that cryptic statement implies.

What was missing from MWD’s ad was an explanation of how this program will translate into actual water in terms of acre-feet, and for how many years this will guarantee an adequate water supply.

Historically, an adequate supply of water has been critical to the Southland’s prosperity. If Gage and his supporters at MWD cannot answer these questions satisfactorily, we can only hope that they will be replaced by Mayor Riordan.

The public deserves to be represented by directors who will tell them the truth and focus their efforts on finding a way for the state to deliver the water it owes us, however difficult that may be.