A Deal That Could Restart the Warfare of Times Past

This week, San Diego has Los Angeles over a barrel--a water barrel.

The San Diego County Water Authority wants permission from the L.A.-based Metropolitan Water District to buy water from farmers in the Imperial Valley and ship it to San Diego through the Met’s Colorado River Aqueduct. A deal appears near, but San Diego’s politicians are holding firm to get what they want. The political momentum appears to be moving in their direction.

Last Thursday, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt boosted San Diego’s cause by again admonishing California’s water agencies to use the water they have more efficiently so that they don’t dip too deeply into the Colorado River. Even the California Legislature appears willing to step in and force a good deal for San Diego if the Met refuses to do so.

All these events might be little more than a curious tale of bureaucratic intrigue if the stakes weren’t so high. As the swirl of events surrounding the San Diego-Imperial deal suggests, Southern California is at a crossroads on the water issue. The region’s grip on outside water sources has not been as tenuous in decades. The potential exists for a Bosnia-like water war that could precipitate a financial crisis for whoever is left holding the bag for the Met’s $6-billion capital-facilities program.

The Met is the regional wholesaler that provides 60% of the water to urban Southern California, including San Diego. For 70 years, it has been an organizational powerhouse, leading its 27 member cities and water agencies on an endless quest for more imported water. Throughout, the Met has held together an unlikely coalition of interests.

Now, however, the quest appears close to an end. All Southern California’s imported-water supplies are on the decline. Los Angeles must cut back its use of Owens Valley water to help restore Mono Lake. Similarly, the Met is faced with reductions in deliveries from Northern California because of the wide-ranging effort there to restore the ecological health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Furthermore, California is under pressure to cut back the water it uses from the Colorado River. And there are no new rivers to dam.

In this volatile environment, the Met is flying apart. The cities and local water agencies that comprise its membership endlessly skirmish over who should get water, who should share it and who should pay for it. But nobody is pressing the Met harder than San Diego.

Ever the reluctant stepchild, San Diego is the agency’s biggest and most vulnerable customer. Historically, it has had no alternative source of water and, therefore, its representatives on the Met board have always felt nervous and insecure. So it’s no surprise that the San Diego County Water Authority jumped at the chance to buy Imperial Valley water and proved willing to pay a steep price for it. (Under the proposed deal, San Diego would still buy most of its water from the Met but could get up to 200,000 acre-feet a year from Imperial.)

In public-policy terms, a deal between the Imperial Valley and urban Southern California makes good sense. Everybody knows the region is going to have to abandon dreams of an ever-expanding supply of imported water. Allowing farmers in the Imperial Valley to sell their water to urban areas creates more efficiencies within the whole system. The latest version of the San Diego deal, which requires that water proceeds be invested in on-farm water conservation in the Imperial Valley, ensures that the agricultural economy will not suffer while urban areas continue to prosper.

But to get the water from the Imperial Valley, San Diego must essentially “rent space” in the Met’s own aqueducts from the Colorado River. While such a deal is legally and technologically possible, it represents a direct threat to the Met’s tradition of centralized power--and to the financial structure that is built on it.

To a great degree, the battle between the Met and San Diego is a fight over money and priority: how much money San Diego should pay the Met to transport the water, and what kind of guarantees San Diego will receive that their water will go through the aqueduct first. In recent weeks, the Met has come down considerably on the basic price, but appears reluctant to hand San Diego a victory on the priority question without a handsome financial payoff.

The Met’s concerns chiefly stem from its responsibility for covering the huge cost of its capital infrastructure, no matter whose water is flowing through the aqueduct. While it has been fighting off San Diego, the Met has been building the mammoth Eastside Reservoir near Hemet, at a cost of $2 billion, plus a feeder canal to the reservoir, which is priced at nearly $1 billion. Less money from customers like San Diego means that other parts of Southern California must accept more of that financial burden.

Viewed from a larger perspective, the San Diego-Met battle is a good ol’ power struggle. For San Diego, the Imperial deal is more than just a transaction: It’s a declaration of independence from L.A. water and the L.A. power structure. Part of what San Diego appears to want is Met recognition of this point.

But the Met doesn’t want to lose face, either. For better or worse, the agency sees itself as the keeper of an old-fashioned idea of a unified regional concern to ensure water, in wet times and dry, for all areas of urban Southern California. Beyond that, the Met has a maze of internal problems. Older cities like Pasadena are resentful of having to help pay for new facilities like the Eastside Reservoir; areas that have their own ground-water supplies, like the San Gabriel Valley, don’t want to have to share the cost of providing water to areas that have no water of their own.

If the San Diego deal goes down, all these problems get a whole lot worse. The Met’s 26 other member agencies will get all the more unruly, and they’ll be resentful that they are bearing costs they think San Diego should share. The whole notion of a region unified around water issues will go out the window. So the Met doesn’t want to give anything up in public anymore than San Diego does.

The bad news for the Met is that the San Diego deal is likely to go down sooner or later. Internal water transfers within California are the wave of the future, and there is considerable political pressure in Sacramento to make the Met buckle. Last year, the Legislature passed a law directing water czar David Kennedy to devise a plan that would allow California to live within its means along the Colorado River. Such a plan will inevitably include the San Diego-Imperial deal. But if the stalemate persists, Sacramento is likely to go one step farther and cram Kennedy’s solution down the Met’s throat.

In the long run, a peaceful transition from downtown fortress to decentralized confederacy probably would have been better for Southern California. It would have given local agencies more flexibility while maintaining a way for the broad regional interest to be served. Unfortunately, it’s always hard for powerful old institutions to change, especially when they’re government agencies run by engineers. That’s why Southern California’s water wars are going to get worse before they get better.