Water Supply Deal May End Decades-Long Feud

Negotiators from the Metropolitan Water District and the San Diego County Water Authority have reached what could be the end to a corrosive decades-long feud while opening a new era in state policy in which water could be bought and sold in an open market.

The deal, announced by Gov. Pete Wilson on Thursday afternoon, is dependent on voter approval of a huge bond measure this fall that would be used in part to cover costs involved in transferring water from Imperial Valley farms to San Diego.

If it is ultimately approved by all the agencies involved, the deal would give cities the ability to acquire water from farmers, provide huge amounts of water for urban expansion and open a potentially wild scramble among cities to get it.

Critics worry that it could enrich some farmers, while at the same time devastating farm-area economies. It could also remove one of the few checks on continued urban expansion.

The proposed agreement would grant San Diego the right to buy up to 200,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year from farmers in the Imperial Valley and ship the water via the MWD’s aqueducts to San Diego. The state would then compensate the MWD for the cost of shipping the water. (An acre-foot is enough for two families of four for a year; 200,000 acre-feet amounts to 64 billion gallons.)

“The benefits of the agreement will provide Southern California residents with a reliable supply source of water from the Colorado River, while making the region less dependent on Northern California water,” Wilson said.

Key members of Wilson’s staff acted as go-betweens in the negotiations, which concluded early Thursday morning in Sacramento.

The boards of directors of both the MWD and the San Diego water agency must approve the deal. The two boards have scheduled special meetings Monday.

None of the negotiators would comment publicly on the talks, but several people familiar with them said the state’s promise to earmark $235 million from a larger state bond issue broke the impasse. The components or final size of that bond issue have yet to be determined, according to the governor’s office. It is expected to be on the November ballot.

Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) said state negotiators put intense pressure on both the MWD and San Diego. He said proposed legislation to reform the MWD had gotten that agency’s attention “and San Diego knew they weren’t going to get anything out of this Legislature. They know the speaker’s from Los Angeles.”

Christine Frahm, a member of the MWD board from San Diego, hailed the proposed pact as a “momentous” breakthrough in the long-running water war.

“It brings to a head more than three years of work, effort, difference--it would be fair to call it a fight. It brings these differences to resolution,” Frahm said.

San Diego has been trying to acquire an independent source of water for years. The Imperial Irrigation District currently is entitled to take more water than it needs from the Colorado River. It is a portion of that excess that the district has negotiated to sell to San Diego.

The MWD has strenuously objected to the sale, saying its other customers throughout Southern California would have to pay shipping costs for water that only San Diego would use. San Diego water authorities have maintained that the MWD’s proposed price for shipping the water was excessive.

Beyond the costs involved, many people with the MWD thought the San Diego-Imperial deal undercut the MWD’s role as the sole supplier of supplemental water to the region. San Diego complained that the MWD was being paternalistic.

The MWD is a consortium of 27 cities and other water districts. It acts as a wholesaler of water to the districts, which serve 16 million people from the Mexican border to Ventura County. The member agencies range in size from the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego to tiny San Marino. They also range greatly in their dependence on the MWD.

San Diego is the largest single buyer of MWD water. Unlike other members, San Diego has virtually no other independent supply. It receives about 90% of its water from the MWD and has chafed at this dependence since being forced to join the MWD during World War II.

Frahm said she and others became particularly concerned about their region’s dependence during the drought of the early 1990s, when the MWD proposed cutting San Diego’s supply in half. Rains in the spring of 1992 made that degree of cut unnecessary but hastened San Diego’s search for an independent supply.

Waiting eagerly to meet the district’s desires were the Bass brothers, the fabled investment family from Texas. They had quietly purchased more than 40,000 acres of Imperial Valley farmland solely to get the water rights. They secretly proposed selling the water--which cost less than $12 an acre-foot because it was for farm use--to San Diego for hundreds of dollars an acre-foot. Over time, the Bass brothers would have made hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal.

That deal was never made, largely because the rights to the water did not belong to the farmers who owned the land, but to the Imperial Irrigation District. In subsequent negotiations, the Imperial district negotiated its own deal with San Diego.

When the MWD found out about the deal, it opened a deep rift on the MWD board. San Diego’s board members were virtually ostracized and much of the agency’s ability to plan came to a halt. The schism took on some elements of farce when it was disclosed that the MWD paid public relations experts more than $250,000 to generate bad publicity for San Diego and the Bass brothers.

The deal will not be without critics. When word of the state bond money being used to patch over the differences between San Diego and the MWD began to circulate in the last week, several observers wondered about both the political viability and ethics of such a deal.

“This makes the Owens Valley look like a walk in the park,” Steve Erie, a San Diego political scientist who studies water policy, said in referring to Los Angeles’ famous dealing to get water from the Owens River in the early 1900s. “With the Owens Valley, the land barons didn’t plan it. They just found out about it and got the land ahead of time. This one was started by the land barons.”

The deal will not necessarily sail through the MWD board.

Board member Mark Dymally, who represents the West Basin Irrigation District, earlier this week said: “I don’t see [state Senate President Pro Tem] John Burton (D-San Francisco) pushing a water bill out of the Senate that’s going to allow Southern California to push its costs to taxpayers all over the state. I just don’t see it.”