San Diego, MWD Water War Heats Up

It is a dispute so intricate and emotional that it has exasperated even an internationally known mediator who has tried to help the combatants reach compromises so they can live together peacefully.

“You cannot go off and lob bombshells into each other’s camp in a complex matter like this,” the mediator, former federal judge Abraham Sofaer, told one of the disputing parties.

Sofaer, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was the top lawyer at the State Department in the latter part of the Reagan administration and was hip-deep in nuclear weapons ban treaties and Middle East peace negotiations.

But the dispute that he describes these days as marked by “enduring hostilities” has nothing to do with weapons or international diplomacy. It has to do with water.

The 50-year-old shotgun marriage between San Diego and Los Angeles over water allocations has reached a crescendo of bickering, tension and political intrigue. Sofaer was retained to see if the marriage could be saved.

On Tuesday, the governing board of the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies 60% of the water used by 16 million people in six Southern California counties, will hold a special meeting to air San Diego’s long-festering grievances.

On the table will be the San Diego County Water Authority’s desire to break its dependence on MWD by buying water from the Imperial Irrigation District in the water-rich Imperial Valley.

In the background will be half a century of resentments that trace their origin to a wartime order by President Franklin Roosevelt for San Diego to join the MWD and forfeit its own allocation of Colorado River water.

Water was desperately needed to accommodate the military and defense industry buildup in San Diego, and Roosevelt could not wait for the city to build its own aqueduct to the Colorado River about 150 miles to the east. Instead, water would come through the 242-mile Colorado River Aqueduct operated by MWD.

Half a century later, San Diego is MWD’s biggest and unhappiest customer. Possessing only scant ground water resources, San Diego buys about 90% of its water from MWD. In turn, a quarter of MWD’s revenue comes from San Diego.

While MWD officials talk of the “Met family,” San Diego officials see the relationship somewhat differently.

“I can say it in two words: involuntary servitude,” said Francesca Krauel, a member of San Diego’s water board and one of its representatives to the MWD board. “We are completely dependent on another metropolis for our future. . . . We were pulled kicking and screaming into MWD and we brought water with us.”

Although San Diego buys upward of 25% of the water sold by MWD, it has “preferential rights” to only about 13%. That means that during a drought, or when water demand in Southern California outstrips supply, San Diego could lose half of its water from MWD.

The city of Los Angeles, which gets most of its water from the Owens Valley, buys only 11% of MWD’s water but has preferential rights to 24% because Los Angeles helped to pay for the agency’s infrastructure after it was formed in 1928.

The “preferential rights” formula has never been invoked--and during two recent droughts all of MWD’s 27 member agencies suffered the same percentage cut. But the fear remains in San Diego that it could be forced to go dry someday so that Los Angeles could increase its purchase of water from MWD and stay wet.

“That’s a phantom concern,” said MWD board Chairman John Foley.

Foley and other MWD officials say San Diego has been treated well by the water district, particularly by benefiting from the infrastructure paid for by other members in the years between 1928 and FDR’s fateful order.

By MWD figures, San Diego has gotten a bargain: paying 22% of MWD’s costs (through water fees and property taxes) since it joined but receiving 25% of the water. Los Angeles, by contrast, has paid 13% of the costs and received 8% of the water.

The MWD position is that San Diego, more than any other city or water agency, has benefited by a regional approach to water. Still, as San Diego has grown into the nation’s sixth-largest city, the political imperative to gain “water independence” from Los Angeles and the MWD has also grown.

“It’s a parent-kid, haves and have-nots, big L.A.-little San Diego, sibling rivalry kind of thing,” said Gilbert Ivey, executive assistant to the MWD general manager. “I’ve been here for 25 years, and it’s always been the same.”

The discussion Tuesday will be on a County Water Authority proposal to continue buying MWD water, but probably at a reduced level. The difference would be made up by water from the Imperial Valley. And water from there, not the MWD, would be used to meet increased demand as San Diego County shakes off its economic doldrums and begins to grow again.

“We are suggesting something that would substantially change the nature of the relationship between San Diego and MWD,” said San Diego water board member Christine Frahm. “That takes a period of emotional adjustment on both sides.”

Not all San Diegans agree with the proposal. Some local water experts have suggested that civic pride and political ambition are dictating San Diego’s water policies, not economic good sense.

John Christianson, a professor of economics at the University of San Diego, argues that Imperial Valley water will prove prohibitively expensive and that San Diego is better off cooperating with MWD and its expansion plans.

“You get the feeling that San Diego hates Los Angeles so much that it will take any chance to dig at L.A., even if it isn’t in our best interests,” said Christianson, an expert on water pricing.

Tuesday’s meeting has its roots in November 1994, when San Diego Mayor Susan Golding unveiled what she called a plan to protect San Diego from mandatory water cutbacks.

Among her proposals were to ask MWD to pledge never to cut San Diego more than 20% during droughts and to have the County Water Authority seek agreements “with independent third parties such as agricultural water districts or farmers who wish to sell surplus water.”

The County Water Authority in September announced that it had entered negotiations with the Imperial Irrigation District to buy some of its water. The Imperial Valley water would be part of a legally binding agreement--and not subject to being reduced during droughts.

In the Imperial Valley, the talk is that San Diego is looking to buy as much as 400,000 acre-feet of water per year (enough for about 2 million people). No deal has been struck yet.

The prospect of a deal between San Diego and Imperial Valley hit with a thud at the MWD board. For one thing, San Diego had kept secret the fact it was talking with the Imperial district.

For another, a San Diego-Imperial deal raises the specter of MWD losing a good share of business from its best customer and then having trouble paying for an ambitious plan of new dams, reservoirs and pipelines, including a $2-billion reservoir near Hemet.

Foley says he cannot understand how the San Diego representatives to the MWD could sit through all the discussions about the building program while negotiating in secret with Imperial.

The San Diego contingent, meanwhile, recalls how the MWD blocked a proposed water sale from Colorado to San Diego in the mid-1980s. So this time, they decided to keep MWD “out of the loop” as long as possible.

Mark Watton, chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority, said MWD’s initial negative reaction to the idea of San Diego buying water from Imperial Valley comes from an outmoded “command and control” mentality.

“Their feeling is: ‘We’re in control, we’re a monopoly and we’re going to fight this,’ ” Watton said.

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There are two ways Imperial Valley water could get to San Diego: through the Colorado River Aqueduct, like other MWD water, or through an aqueduct, which doesn’t exist now, from the Imperial Valley.

Building a new aqueduct could cost more than $1 billion. Sending the water through the Colorado River Aqueduct would mean striking a deal with MWD, where many board members are rubbed raw by what they see as San Diego’s attempt to use the Legislature or Gov. Pete Wilson (a former San Diego mayor) to pressure MWD.

“They [San Diego] want to win at any cost and they’re willing to do some behind-the-scenes, subversive things,” said MWD board member Jerry King, who represents an Orange County water district. “Why should MWD trust them?”

On the other hand, even as MWD was setting up the Tuesday meeting to make peace in the family, its general counsel, N. Gregory Taylor, sent a letter April 10 to the Imperial Irrigation District that did exactly the opposite.

Taylor asserted that, under the web of state and federal laws that determine how Colorado River water is shared, the Imperial district may lack the legal right to sell Colorado River water to San Diego or anyone else. If Taylor is right, it would scuttle the San Diego deal or at least tie it up in litigation.

Vincent Biondo, attorney for the County Water Authority, said the letter “seems about as close to a declaration of war as you can get.”

Gary Broomell, who represents rural Valley Center on the County Water Authority, has sympathy for designated peacemaker Sofaer, who has been criticized by some MWD directors for allegedly favoring San Diego.

“I think Abe thought he’d come in, mediate and be out quickly, that it was just a simple water deal,” Broomell said. “But when you’ve got so many angry factions, nothing is simple with water.”