Water Restored to Mono Lake, Owens River

As a former Department of Water and Power manager who was in charge of Los Angeles’ drinking water quality for five years, I find Robert Jones’ essay, “Death of ‘Chinatown’ ” (Feb. 12), sad and disturbing. Jones and Richard Katz simplistically portray the battle over L.A.’s water diversions as the big, bad, stupid DWP vs. the ragtag and helpless Mono Lake Committee. They apparently do not understand, nor care about, the underlying economic and social issues.

The water diverted from the Mono Lake watershed and the Eastern Sierra is the best quality drinking water and lowest cost water in Southern California. Part of this lost drinking water will be replaced with reclaimed sewage water. Water bills in Los Angeles have more than doubled in the last decade, in large part to pay for conservation programs, sewage reclamation facilities and additional imported water from the California Aqueduct.

The influential DWP customers on L.A.’s Westside, along with the San Francisco Bay area environmental community, led the charge to restore Mono Lake. The resulting high water bills and the poorer quality drinking water were not of concern to the affluent, Perrier-drinking Westside community. The large number of low-income families that compose the majority of L.A.’s citizens never understood the issues and had no effective political voice. The DWP was trying to represent these customers, the people who drink tap water and struggle to pay their water bills.

LARRY McREYNOLDS

La Crescenta

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* We’re all happy that Mono Lake is saved, but Jones missed a couple of marks. Los Angeles never was “sucking Mono dry.” The lake’s water is saline and unfit to drink. The issue was whether DWP could continue to divert Rush Creek from flowing down the Eastern Sierra and into the lake. The Mono Lake Committee deserves a big E for effort, but its efforts were futile until the conservation organization Cal Trout and Mono County Dist. Atty. Stan Eller hit DWP with Section 5937 of the state Fish and Game Code that requires all fisheries to be maintained with proper flows. Rush Creek is a wonderful little trout stream, and those trout saved Mono Lake, which has no fish. It’s too briny.

Later, when a DWP penstock broke above the Owens Gorge north of Bishop and accidentally rewatered that historic brown trout fishery, Cal Trout and Eller pounced again. Forced to do the right thing, DWP invited media and staged a grand ceremony to reopen the flows and demonstrate its love of the environment. What will it take to get DWP to restore Owens Lake? Maybe DWP will do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do.

RICHARD R. ROBERTS

Wilmington