MWD Leadership Battle Is Averted; O.C. District Official Gets Top Post : Election: John V. Foley is considered a middle-of-the-roader. His focus will be to find new sources of water for Southern California.

In a surprise turn of events, John V. Foley of Laguna Niguel has become general manager of the giant Metropolitan Water District.

Foley, 61, currently the general manager of the Moulton Niguel Water District, was unanimously named to the non-paying job on Tuesday, becoming the first chairman of the 65-year-old agency--called Met--to come from Orange County.

That came after environmental activist Tim Brick, knowing he didn’t have the votes to win, suddenly withdrew from the race and threw his support to Foley, a middle-of-the-road, old-guard MWD member.

Foley called his election a win for the Orange County delegation to the Met board, which urged him to run. He serves that board as a director of the Municipal Water District of Orange County.

“I did not seek this out aggressively,” Foley said Wednesday. “It was probably that the Orange County delegation felt I could win.”

Foley said his primary goal is to find new sources of water for Southern California.

“We can’t sit back and say we are going to conserve our way into the future. That just won’t do the job. Met has to look for other horizons, including water marketing, pulling water from underground basins and reclamation.”

Foley and Brick 47, come from markedly different backgrounds and display dissimilar styles.

Brick, who until recently sported a bushy white mustache, is a writer and organizational consultant. He once sued the MWD over campaign expenditures during the Peripheral Canal campaign. He was appointed to the MWD in 1985.

Foley, 63, a florid-faced man with swept-back white hair, is a graduate of West Point who served as an engineer in the Army and took over management of the Moulton Niguel Water District in Orange County after his retirement. He has served on the MWD since 1989.

Foley, who was effusive in his praise of Brick, said he learned of his rival’s plan to withdraw only five minutes before the MWD meeting began.

“He had the votes,” Brick said during a recess. “I had accomplished what I wanted to do in terms of focusing on research programs in the future.”

Neither Brick nor Foley expect the MWD to drastically change from its present policies of seeking new, environmentally safe water sources, a course set by former Chairman Michael Cage, who stepped down in September at the request of Mayor Richard Riordan.

“I think Mike set a good course,” Foley said. “I think he recognized that our environmental direction needed to be tuned.”

Even members of environmental groups agreed before the election that the MWD was unlikely to make major policy shifts regardless of which candidate became chairman.

“I would be surprised if the MWD substantially changes direction,” said Tom Graff, attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund in Oakland. “I don’t see Foley as necessarily standing for the return to an old way of doing business and I don’t see Brick as a revolutionary.”

Foley, who will fill the one year left on Cage’s term, takes the helm of the MWD at a time when it is engaged in a bitter debate with the state Department of Water Resources over allocation of Sacramento River water. Complaining that agricultural interests are receiving water meant for the MWD, the agency has threatened to withhold $413 million in state water payments.

A $50-million installment on the state water bill is due in January, but the MWD voted Tuesday to delay payment while staff members try to extract a larger water allotment during negotiations with state officials.

The board also voted to revamp its complex rate structure to encourage conservation, and acted to make new development pay its share of costs.

The MWD is also wrestling with a host of other problems, including where to build its headquarters.

On Tuesday the board voted to open negotiations with Catellus Development to build a $100-million headquarters as part of the redevelopment of Union Station. The site is one of several Downtown locations being considered. The strongest rival was a proposal to rebuild MWD headquarters on its current Sunset Boulevard campus near Dodger Stadium.