Southland’s Water Future May Hinge on Bitter Dispute

The heirs of the power brokers who made Southern California are fighting among themselves--and again the fight is about water, and the money and power it brings.

The battle centers on San Diego County’s determined quest to buy water directly from the farmers in the water-rich Imperial Valley, a move that officials in both areas say is long overdue and mutually beneficial.

But standing in the way is the mighty Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The MWD, which owns the Colorado River Aqueduct that brings water to Southern California, warns that the proposed deal threatens the economy and lifestyle of 16 million residents because it could undercut the regional cooperation that has worked so well for decades.

It is a battle of litigation and legislation, negotiation and mediation, politics and press agentry. And there is nothing less at stake than the future allocation of water for all of Southern California, its cost and its availability and who will control it.

Oh yes, plus the destiny of San Diego, that pretty popinjay that fashions itself America’s Finest City. And maybe the future of agriculture in the Imperial Valley, one of the world’s great growing regions.

The dispute could trigger one of the most fundamental shifts in water policy since Colorado River water began flowing to coastal Southern California in 1941, officials agree. It also could lead to the biggest transfer of water from agricultural users to urban and suburban users in Southern California history.

The consequences of those changes could be felt across the region for decades, possibly in higher water rates for homes and businesses.

Water disputes tend to flow for decades, but the showdown in this one could come within weeks or months, either in a compromise bargain, state legislation or a court case set for a ruling in October.

On the surface, it all sounds simple and obvious.

The Imperial Valley has more water than it needs. What it needs instead is cash.

The San Diego County Water Authority would like to buy some of that water--about 200,000 acre-feet a year, enough for 400,000 families--to break its near total dependence on the MWD, water wholesaler for 16 million thirsty people in six counties and the nation’s largest provider of treated water.

The MWD has its marvelous 242-mile Colorado aqueduct from Lake Havasu to Lake Matthews near Riverside--and a pipeline system--that could whisk some of the Imperial Valley’s annual share of the river’s water to San Diego.

State law encourages water transfer deals. The federal government, increasingly annoyed about California’s lavish use of water, may soon require them.

But the devil, as always, is in the details.

It bears remembering that the people entangled in this three-way dispute are the successors--and in one case, the blood relatives--of men and women who set and accomplished large and impressive goals. None is willing to see those accomplishments unravel.

The MWD, possibly more than any other governmental entity, made arid Southern California livable and prosperous by delivering water cheaply and reliably and in ever-increasing amounts. The agency’s officials are proud of that heritage.

San Diego officials are equally proud of being the successors to the visionaries who molded their city into an attractive and comfortable urban center. And in the Imperial Valley, the farmers are the children and grandchildren of pioneers whose grit and sacrifice created a billion-dollar agricultural economy from a wasteland.

As in many water disputes, the sense of battling for one’s life is ever present.

MWD officials say they are not opposed in principle to the deal as long as San Diego continues to pay its share of the cost of maintaining the agency’s whole intricate water delivery system. If San Diego--as it wants to--pays only the specific cost of transporting its water, the officials warn of higher water prices for all of Southern California because of “cost shifting” to other customers..

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San Diegans, at least the politicians, are worried about their city being thwarted in its bid for self-determination and instead being left forever under the yoke of Los Angeles and the MWD.

And Imperial Valley farmers, at least some of them, are worried that their way of life is imperiled by the chimera of quick profits.

A retired diplomat, Abraham Sofaer, is trying to help San Diego and the Imperial Irrigation District reach a price for the sale. The director of the state Water Resources Agency, David Kennedy, an appointee of Gov. Pete Wilson, is trying to mediate between San Diego and the MWD over how much the Los Angeles-based agency can charge for sending the water through its aqueduct (called a wheeling rate).

The MWD--over opposition from San Diego and the Imperial Valley--has gone to court to get its wheeling rate formula validated. And a bill to set the terms of the water transfer is pending in a key committee in the Legislature.

“Water is the lifeblood of us all, and we need it or we’ll die,” said Dave Nuffer, Imperial Valley native, longtime San Diego civic booster and veteran of innumerable water wars, including this one. “That’s why water politics are such a vicious proposition.

“No one trusts anybody else, and everyone is self-righteous. It’s always been that way.”

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Talk about water in Southern California and sooner or later the discussion comes back to “Chinatown.” The 1974 movie starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway provides a Hollywood treatment of Los Angeles’ quest for the vital liquid that included the acquisition, by foul means and fair, of water from the Owens Valley.

But there is another water movie, and it may be more relevant to understanding the current struggles among San Diego, the MWD and the Imperial Valley.

The movie is “The Rainmaker” (Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn), filmed in 1956. It tells the tale of a parched, desperate, highly gullible little town that falls under the hypnotic spell of an itinerant fast-talker who promises to magically produce rain.

“The Rainmaker” was patterned (loosely) after the 1915 scandal involving San Diego and a starchy Quaker named Charles Hatfield, the self-proclaimed Moisture Accelerator.

The downpour that followed Hatfield’s effort dropped 38 inches in one month, busted dams, washed out homes and farms and roads, and drowned 20 people. What followed was 20 years of controversy, ridicule, litigation and a civic feeling that San Diego was forever cursed by water troubles.

In the 1930s, San Diego--devoid of ground water--secured an allocation from the Colorado River and assisted the Imperial Valley in constructing the All-American Canal, which brings water from the Colorado to the valley. But money and politics prevented San Diego from building an aqueduct to stretch the 100 miles from the All-American Canal to San Diego.

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During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, determined that burgeoning Navy installations in San Diego have water, forced a reluctant San Diego to join the MWD and give up its Colorado allocation in exchange for getting use of the MWD infrastructure.

Half a century later, the shotgun marriage has grown into a rancorous relationship in which San Diego feels bullied and disrespected and the MWD views San Diego as selfish and ungrateful.

San Diego buys 90% of its water from the MWD--about 400,000 acre-feet per year--and pays 24% of the agency’s costs, making it the MWD’s biggest, unhappiest customer.

One irritant is the MWD formula for years of shortage. San Diego could suffer a 50% cut, while Los Angeles, as an MWD founder, could increase its water purchases.

During the Depression, while San Diego remained pinch-penny and aloof, voters in 13 growing cities approved a $220-million bond issue to build the world’s biggest aqueduct to deliver water from the Colorado River to the Southern California heartland. Los Angeles joined the coalition as a hedge against the day its Owens Valley water fell short.

Fear in San Diego that the city of Los Angeles will increase its water purchase from the MWD, to the detriment of San Diego, has never been higher--despite MWD assurance that San Diego is not at risk of being denied water.

The courts have ordered Los Angeles to cut its use of water from the Owens Valley and the Mono Basin. The federal government is threatening to reduce California’s share of the Colorado.

San Diego County is still smarting from cuts imposed by the MWD during the 1991 drought, which, while not nearly 50%, San Diego officials saw as proof that the MWD would rather keep its founding customers wet and happy even if it meant hurting San Diego and the farms in its region.

“Fundamentally, what is at issue for San Diego is their feeling that they do not have enough choices and control over the future,” said James Waldo, a state-appointed mediator who has tried to get San Diego and the MWD to reach a voluntary compromise on the wheeling rate issue.

The zeal to establish “water independence”--that is, independence from Los Angeles--has been a political mantra in San Diego for decades, including for a young assemblyman named Pete Wilson, elected mayor in 1971.

The big question is whether San Diego residents will pay higher water bills to get Imperial Valley water that is not prone to being reduced by the MWD during drought years. (Even if the 200,000 acre-feet deal is approved, it would be phased in over several years and would serve partly to accommodate expected residential growth. San Diego’s purchase of MWD water would not drop the full 200,000 acre-feet, but would still be much reduced.)

San Diego officials have repeatedly charged that the MWD is trying to scuttle the Imperial Valley deal--and keep San Diego captive--by demanding too high a price to bring the water through the aqueduct.

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The MWD is equally adamant that San Diego County should continue to pay its share of the MWD’s overhead and expansion costs, such as the $1.9-billion reservoir being built in Riverside County. Giving San Diego a break on the wheeling rate would mean shifting costs to the other 26 agencies that buy from the MWD, officials insist.

One MWD study suggests that San Diego could be shifting $10 million to $80 million a year in costs to ratepayers in other MWD member agencies if it prevails in the wheeling rate dispute. Officials in those agencies are fuming at San Diego.

John Wodraska, general manager of the MWD, said San Diego’s zeal for its “own” water threatens the regional approach to water that has served Southern California well for decades and been the envy of the water industry.

“Now people are saying, ‘We don’t want to pay for all that other stuff--we just want to pay for the concrete it takes to line the one section of canal that we want to use,’ ” Wodraska said. “It’s not a great leap, at that point, for them to ask why we even need MWD.”

Wodraska is concerned that if San Diego succeeds in getting the Imperial Valley water at less than the true overall cost of transporting it, the deal might encourage other agencies to seek similar arrangements, undermining the MWD.

Steven Erie, political science professor at UC San Diego, says the driving force in that city is not water reality but an irrational desire to strike back at L.A., whose interests are seen as dictating MWD policies.

“The deal is a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,” Erie said. “A few large Imperial Valley landowners . . . stand to make untold millions of dollars while 16 million Southern California water users--including those in San Diego County--could be forced to pay much more than they need to for water.”

During a recent trip to Sacramento, San Diego officials distributed to legislators a picture of the kind of alleged outrage they no longer want to pay for: the $130-million MWD headquarters being built next to Union Station.

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Hollywood has never made a movie out of the Imperial Valley’s water struggle.

But on the eastbound side of Interstate 8, as one enters the valley from the mountains, is a sign that says everything about its economic dependence on the Colorado River: “Food Grows Where Water Flows.”

A century ago the valley was a blisteringly hot, ferociously forbidding vacant place that the Spanish explorers had abandoned and labeled the Valley of the Damned.

Today, 141,500 people live there and half a million acres are under cultivation, making the valley one of the world’s most bountiful agricultural regions, all thanks to 3.3 million acre-feet of Colorado River water a year. If diverted to urban use, that would satisfy the annual needs of 6 million households, or virtually all of Southern California.

The Imperial Valley is water-rich because its pioneers were diverting the Colorado when San Diego was a dusty village and the MWD was not even a glimmer in the eyes of L.A. land barons. In water law there is a principle called “first in time, first in right.” One kicker is that the law also says no one has the right to waste water and that water wasters can have their share of the Colorado cut. The federal Bureau of Reclamation has concluded that the Imperial Valley is wasting water.

The MWD has suggested that the federal government, which controls the Colorado River, cede 200,000 acre-feet of the allocation of the Imperial Valley and two smaller agricultural areas to the MWD.

The proposal is included in the state Department of Water Resources’ California Plan, to be submitted soon to the federal government to explain how the state can live with a threatened 20% cut in its Colorado River allocation.

The MWD suggestion is the equivalent of matches tossed in dry leaves--fueling a longtime belief among farmers that thirsty urbanites are plotting to grab the Imperial Valley’s water. Many of the Imperial Valley’s pioneers moved there from the Owens Valley after the latter “lost” its water to Los Angeles.

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In a passionate presentation to the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors, Louise Willey, 77, who has farmed for decades with her sons, sounded a dire alarm about the California Plan. Willey, whose prominence in the Imperial Valley has been likened to that of actress Barbara Stanwyck in TV’s “The Big Valley,” remembered her father, 70 years ago, sleeping on the headgate of their irrigation ditch to guard against water theft.

“When the smoke clears and the lawyers and politicians have completed the California Plan, where will we stand?” Willey asked. “Will we be farming the same acreage? Will still more demands be made of us? Will this be the beginning of the end of agriculture?”

Willey and others are worried that the water sale to San Diego could encourage some farmers to quit farming and sell water instead, creating absentee owners and leaving dusty fields, unemployment and devastation for businesses that depend on farming.

The controversy is fanned by the arrival of the high-rolling Bass brothers of Texas, who have purchased or leased 40,000 acres of Imperial Valley land in recent years and are among the most ardent supporters of selling water to San Diego or anyone else who wants it.

Still to be decided is how the Imperial Irrigation District will split the hundreds of millions (maybe billions) of dollars that San Diego is willing to pay. How much will be spent on conservation to save water? Which farmers will be allowed to make a profit? Will some move to La Jolla or some other comfy clime and live off water profits?

The water sales proposal has split the Imperial Valley farm community. Some farmers say the deal is too good to pass up, a wonderful opportunity to boost the fortunes of chronically undercapitalized farms.

Others say they just want to avoid getting snookered by state and federal politicians. “I just hope we don’t end up a bunch of stuck hogs down here,” said Bill Dubois, who farms near El Centro.