Progress on Water Has Many Enemies

Twenty years ago, Rand Corp., a Santa Monica think tank, proposed cutting the ties between water supply and politics so that its price would reflect what a buyer was willing to pay, not what government ruled it was worth. Government’s only role would be that of a utility commission to make sure that the wealthy did not get most of the water, leaving the poor with moist mud. Rand reasoned that if water were priced in an open market, buyers would waste far less of it, and the state’s barely adequate, perhaps even meager, supplies would stretch further.

It made sense to some Californians--mostly economists--who saw no reason to treat water differently than any other commodity that got haggled over. But it was intensely ignored by those with the largest stake in keeping things as they were, particularly farmers and managers of water agencies who were the law unto themselves.

The concept of a free market in water is no longer a barrier to change, thanks in large part to the economists, who helped turn doubters around, and to former Sen. Bill Bradley, now a Democratic candidate for president. With Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat, as co-sponsor, Bradley wrote much of Rand’s analysis into a bill in 1992. Then he not only got the bill through Congress but also got President Bush to sign it while then-Gov. Pete Wilson, farm groups and strong Bush supporters pleaded for a veto.

Tim Quinn, then a planner for the Metropolitan Water District, urged his agency to support the bill as one way to free up water the Met would need in the future.

Private companies, including Cadiz Inc., a subsidiary of foreign investors, are preparing to get into the water business. A representative of Cadiz, Keith Brackpool, is in fact the closest advisor on water matters to Gov. Gray Davis.

Why, then, are the same people who fought the bill as well as the economic missionaries who supported it acting as though the Bradley bill doesn’t exist seven years after it became law? Largely because Bradley’s bill wrapped its arms around every environmental problem caused by waste, around increasing the price of irrigation water, around who wins and who loses when the state’s water policies are revised on a grand scale and around whose water it is to begin with.

Americans today live in a winner-take-all society that is very different from the days when an implied social contract counseled providing the greatest good for the greatest number. In the heat of battle over who is in charge of water policy, it is possible to forget that a shoddy, wasteful water system would someday lead to misery for millions of real human beings.

Agribusiness and big water agencies still want higher dams, more reservoirs and fewer restrictions on water development just as urgently as they did in 1992.

Environmentalists still want to heal damage caused by huge pumps shipping water south from rivers and the prolific nursery of wildlife and fish known to Californians simply as “the delta.” The only way to do that is to put some limits on the amount of water that can be pumped.

So what is slowing progress on water and creating mistrust between the two opposing views is a kind of nervous exhaustion. Poker players are cool, we say. But put even the best of them around a table and make them deal hands for seven straight years, and they would be climbing the walls. California’s special water interests are doing just that, except they are jumping the gun in courts and letting off steam with angry press releases.

As an example of the adversarial mood these days: Two men--Tom Graff, an Environmental Defense Fund lawyer with a degree in economics, and Quinn, also an economist, now deputy general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the largest agency of its kind in the nation--worked hard and effectively together to get the Bradley-Miller bill enacted, though they came at the problem with different perspectives. Today, they’re barely on speaking terms. Quinn wants to get started on projects to get more water. Graff believes that technical fixes should wait until all of the waste possible has been squeezed out of the existing system so that California can tell the difference between new structures it needs and those it can do without.

Part of the snail’s pace of putting the 7-year-old law to work is caused by the approach to writing the rules for implementing the law that has been taken by Cal-Fed, a joint commission of water specialists appointed by state and federal officials. It’s held hearings from one end of the state to the other, drafted and redrafted dozens of versions of the new rules, in an effort to avoid hurt feelings among the interest groups scrambling to have their own way. That’s as hopeless a goal as is the chance of any group getting all it wants from the Cal-Fed process.

A seemingly endless battle over how to allocate Colorado River water between urban and rural users in Southern California was settled last week. The issues were different and in some ways more complex than those Cal-Fed is struggling with. But there was enough similarity--including buying and selling water in a free market--to raise hopes that the Cal-Fed effort need not be an exercise in futility.

Science has yet to find a way to manufacture water. If it could be done, the nation wouldn’t be spending money to blow holes in the moon to see whether any water comes out.

If California needs to stretch its supplies, it must stop wasting what it already can capture. And for that to happen, Cal-Fed must get to the really hard issues faster and let the differences among the specialists be hammered out in plain view rather than in courtrooms.