Task Force Report Describes Decline of a Water Giant

Tuesday was an important day in the long story of how the tangled, bitter and occasionally bloody politics of water has shaped California.

Not as exciting as May 21, 1924, when a band of rebellious Owens Valley men stole three boxes of dynamite and blew a hole in the aqueduct carrying water from the valley to Los Angeles.

Tuesday’s event was in the hands of people who wore suits rather than the informal attire of Owens Valley ranchers. They were members of a task force appointed to propose ways to modernize the giant 65-year-old Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Their report, released Tuesday, is hard reading. I got a lot more enjoyment from William H. Kahrl’s account of the violent 1924 water war in his excellent book “Water and Power.” But when a 21st-Century historian writes a book about water, the task force’s report will be part of it, for it shows the role politics plays in bringing water to our homes and businesses.

*

The Metropolitan Water District has been a political power in California since it began in 1928. It was conceived by the Southern California business and political establishment and the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, William Mulholland, who designed and built the Owens Valley aqueduct. All were obsessed with a fear that our semiarid Southland plain, upon which they had staked their fortunes, would run out of water.

The MWD imported water from the Colorado River and, beginning in the 1960s, from the distant reaches of Northern California. Backed by big businesses and their powerful lobbyists, Metropolitan was a dominant force in the state Capitol. If the Met needed help with a bill in the Legislature, it quietly called on a few campaign- contributing businesses, whose CEOs or lobbyists pounded recalcitrant lawmakers into submission.

When former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Mike Gage became chairman of the Met board in January, 1993, he realized those days were long past. Before he moved to L.A., Gage had been an assemblyman in Northern California. He had seen Northern California interests, led by environmentalists, amass enough power and smarts to block Southern California’s once-unimpeded drive for ever more water. Once on the Met’s board, Gage felt that the old agency must become tougher, leaner and quicker or it would be overwhelmed in the battle for California’s increasingly scarce resources.

He turned to Nelson Rising, an attorney, land developer and high-powered back-room political operator. Rising is senior partner in Maguire Thomas Partners, which is building the big Playa Vista residential and commercial development near Marina del Rey. Like the developers of old, Maguire Thomas needs water. With Rising as chairman, a task force of 27 began studying ways of modernizing the MWD for the ‘90s.

In making its proposals, the task force noted the new realities. The MWD is losing to more powerful rivals. The state is giving agriculture a greater share of water imported from Northern California. Environmentalists may force further reductions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an important Southern California water resource.

“At one time, MWD was extremely powerful, but the rise of new water policy interest groups has diluted its impact, often to the point where it cannot count on support from state and federal officials representing its member constituencies,” the report said. “The MWD is not seen as an effective coalition builder, often ignoring opportunities to build new alliances and sometimes alienating old allies. Agricultural leaders are particularly bitter. . . .”

*

The task force report concluded that the MWD needs to become the leader of a powerful regional coalition that will have clout in Sacramento and Washington.

First of all, the Met must sharpen up management at home. The task force said that the MWD engineers have spent at least $200 million and begun “blasting apart a mountain” for the proposed Domenigoni Reservoir in Riverside County without having a top level management review committee determine whether such a big project is needed.

Second, it should try to revive its old political power.

MWD, the report said, should rebuild its alliance with the Central Valley’s agribusiness, which wields immense power in Sacramento because of campaign contributions to Gov. Pete Wilson and legislators. Metropolitan should also “add an additional high-level, high-profile staff person in Sacramento” and maybe in Washington.

In other words, the route from the river to the water tap still runs through the political landscape.