MWD Keeps Pot Near Boil in Water Wars

The governing board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California took time last week to search for the appropriate term to describe the ruckus it has kicked up recently in the water world.

“It’s fairly obvious to me that we’re in battle--full battle,” said Jorge G. Castro, who represents the Central Basin Municipal Water District.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as starting a war,” said Bill Luddy, who represents Los Angeles. “I would characterize it as asking a clear and necessary question.”

Whatever you call it, the MWD’s recent strategy of questioning whether four agricultural irrigation districts should continue getting the lion’s share of the state’s annual allocation from the Colorado River has been explosive from San Diego to Washington.

Not that fighting over water is new to the MWD.

This is the agency that made modern Southern California a reality by fighting and largely winning the political, legal and engineering battles to provide this semiarid region with a water supply that is reliable, plentiful and affordable.

Now the MWD is engaged in a two-front war that will determine the future of its main sources of water--the Sacramento, San Joaquin Delta and the Colorado River.

Rightly or wrongly, the MWD says that it is being pummeled in both disputes and that the future of 16 million people and a $500-billion regional economy is in peril.

As a result, the mega-agency has adopted a policy that, once the bureaucratese is stripped away, boils down to: “We’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

“MWD seems to feel very put upon,” said an outside official. Put upon and misunderstood.

At the Tuesday meeting, Luddy made a comment to the effect that the MWD’s hometown of Los Angeles is an island of sanity in an otherwise bizarre world.

Not only has the MWD been losing battles lately, it has not been making many friends.

The MWD has irritated the Legislature--where a hearing is set for today--and has come away bitterly disappointed in negotiations over future water supplies.

In the dispute over cleaning up the brackish delta, the MWD’s preferred alternative, a north-south peripheral canal that would allow the MWD to receive clean water from north of the delta, has been put on the back burner. Former Gov. Pete Wilson, long a canal supporter, backed down rather than go to war with Northern California and the environmental movement.

In the Colorado River dispute, Wilson and the Legislature forced the MWD to accept a massive sale of water from the Imperial Irrigation District to the San Diego County Water Authority, long the MWD’s biggest and most dissatisfied member and customer.

The delta dispute is pretty much beyond the MWD’s influence. An attempt at forging a pro-canal alliance between water agencies in the south and north and more moderate environmental groups failed.

But in the Colorado River controversy, the MWD has some leverage, possibly for the last time in a generation. The Colorado River negotiations are supposed to settle matters of allocation and efficient use for decades.

Unless the MWD reaches an agreement with the Imperial Irrigation District and the Coachella Valley Water District over water allocations and money matters, the water sale between Imperial and San Diego, considered crucial to the state’s water future, cannot be consummated.

Add to this the fact that the MWD is undergoing a leadership change at the top, always a propitious time for repudiating old strategies and developing new ones.

In October, John Wodraska resigned as general manager to take a lucrative job in the private sector. A nationwide search is underway for Wodraska’s successor.

In December, John Foley, who runs the water and sewer district in Laguna Niguel, ended his five-year term as MWD board chairman. As his successor, board members selected Phillip J. Pace, who owns a land development firm in Montebello and is a board member of the Central Basin Municipal Water District.

With the more assertive Pace as chairman, the MWD board has adopted an aggressive strategy for getting more water from the Colorado River. No more Mr. Consensus.

The Pace-led strategy has been to launch an assault on the most heavily fortified spot of legal and political high ground in the California water wars map: the 1931 agreement that assures that more than 75% of the state’s annual allocation of Colorado River water goes to Imperial, Coachella and tiny districts serving farmers in the Palo Verde Valley and Yuma, Ariz.

In the Wodraska-Foley era, the MWD strategy was to muffle its discontent over the 1931 agreement lest it rile up the agricultural irrigation districts and lead to costly and time-consuming litigation.

That strategy ended last month when the MWD board endorsed a policy statement asking Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to consider changing the 1931 allocation formula and accusing Babbitt of ignoring the needs of coastal Southern California.

The reaction was predictable: The Imperial district, where water rights date to 1895, went ballistic, Coachella was peeved and San Diego expressed shock.

Babbitt, considered the most water-knowledgeable Interior secretary in the nation’s history, said he lacked authority to change the 1931 agreement. He implored the MWD to drop the matter. Others have done likewise.

“We’re baffled that [Metropolitan] would take unilateral, warlike actions,” Bruce Kuhn, president of the Imperial Irrigation District, told the MWD board last week. “We urge you to rethink what you are doing before you provoke a water crisis in which everyone will lose.”

A day later, Babbitt, exasperated at the in-your-face tone of letters from Pace, called off his attempts to mediate negotiations between the MWD, Imperial and Coachella.

Part of Babbitt’s frustration is that he felt the MWD had concluded in the latter stages of the Wodraska-Foley era that its best bet was to cooperate with the San Diego-Imperial deal in order to get two things it wants desperately:

* More generous rules about when the MWD can receive surplus water from the Colorado River.

* A new method of operating Lake Mead, the giant reservoir behind Hoover Dam, that would also mean more water for the MWD.

One water official compares the MWD and the Imperial Irrigation District--the nation’s largest water wholesaler and the nation’s largest agricultural irrigation district, respectively--to sumo wrestlers who will have to do battle for a while before anything is settled.

No one can say for sure that the Pace gambit, despite early opposition, will not succeed.

For all its talk of safeguarding its water with guns and lawyers, Imperial Valley could opt to find a way to bend rather than risk litigation. Babbitt has warned Kuhn and others that there is no assurance the 1931 agreement would stand up if challenged in court.

On the other hand, the MWD board could conclude that continuing to mention the unmentionable is just too risky because it could annoy Babbitt enough to carry through on his threat to reduce the allocation of surplus Colorado River water to the MWD.

What’s worse, the MWD could anger Arizona, Nevada and other states that depend on the Colorado River to the point that they will never agree to rule changes involving surplus water and operation of Lake Mead that are beneficial to the MWD and California.

Mark Twain, who found California a delightful carnival of ambition and connivance, would not be surprised at the current goings-on. Twain is credited with the oft-repeated assertion that whiskey is for drinking but water is for fighting.

A freshly sworn-in MWD board member last week greeted his new colleagues with a variation on the old joke, ascribing it to a friend who had given him a bottle of wine.

The laughter was, at best, wan among the 51-member board. Many members could manage only tight, pained little smiles.

Maybe the joke has been used too much.

Or maybe it’s no longer funny to people who feel they have been on the losing end of too many fights over water.