Views on Water District Off Mark

* Dennis J. Aigner, dean of the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management, missed the mark in his Times op-ed piece (“Chance for Rational Thinking Missed,” July 26).

The California-American Water Co.’s proposal was an attempted hijacking of the Santa Margarita Water District’s publicly owned assets, not simply an effort to privatize. The Local Agency Formation Commission was right to turn them down.

SMWD, unlike its troubled past, is now efficiently run by a competent board of local citizens and a sharp young general manager. Cal-Am had seen an opportunity when the district was beset by scandal and used a loophole in the Cortese-Knox Act, which its lobbyists helped create.

This was a flagrant example of special-interest legislation being used to enrich its sponsors.

Most local water agencies already extensively employ privatization by [seeking] competitive bids for engineering and construction services.

Private build-and-operate contracts, under local agency jurisdiction, are also a growing legitimate form of privatizing utility functions.

The dean is correct, however, in his perception that local citizens, when informed, favor local control and will be rightly suspicious of slogans--such as “privatization”--which may be used to rip them off.

WAYNE A. CLARK

Executive director

Urban Water Institute