Water, the Issue That Will Never Evaporate

California’s first gold rush began on the 9th of March in 1842, in a small tributary canyon of the Santa Clara River valley, in the northern end of what is now Los Angeles County.

Under a riverbank oak tree, a cattleman named Francisco Lopez either awoke from a nap to find “a pool of gold,” or, more reasonably, yanked a few wild onions out of the earth and found flakes of gold among the bits of dirt.

As gold rushes go, it was a flash in the pan, played out after a few years and a few thousand ounces. But it was enough to lure to California a man who recognized another kind of gold: land.

A hundred-plus years ago, Henry Mayo Newhall bought up swaths of local land; towns were named for him and for Saugus, his Massachusetts birthplace.

His name still sits large on the landscape, on a housing development that proves that in sufficient quantity, the dirt on those onions--land--is as valuable as the gold flakes. Newhall Ranch is the biggest development in Los Angeles County, bigger even than postwar Lakewood, where 17,000 houses were raised up in two years’ time.

When it is done, some 70,000 souls will live there--will drive on roads, run air conditioners, take showers, play golf, grow lawns, breathe air and pollute it.

L.A. County supervisors approved the project last fall, and this week OKd its equally disputatious environmental impact report. It did not go unremarked that over the years, $136,034 of Newhall money has found its way to the campaigns of all five supervisors.

Henry Mayo Newhall was right: Land is gold.

But California gold comes in other colors too: the black gold of oil, the green gold of agriculture and the stuff that flowed at Francisco Lopez’s feet, the froth-white gold of water.

The fight over Newhall Ranch, over growth, promises to be the opening bout on California’s fight card for decades to come.

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“Whiskey’s fer drinkin’, and water’s fer fightin’ over.” Moderns like to quote that quaint frontier expression, and golly, haven’t times changed?

In truth, no. We can build aqueducts and dams and install low-flush toilets. But water is still a zero-sum commodity, so precious that only TV comics and New Yorkers laughed at the notion floated a couple of decades ago that we sail an iceberg down from the Pole to help keep California wet. Even insulated by the intricate artifices of pipes and canals, no Californian who has lived through even a modest drought can fail to take it seriously.

Water is the one inexorable, implacable limit on the state’s one limitless resource, population.

Yet California is not yet living like it is.

A 1995 law, as revolutionary as it was modest, says local governments must consider water supply before approving new suburbs--consider, not mandate. Even so, the “water escrow” law was the first clue that after nearly 150 years, if you build it, water may not come.

Newhall Ranch, proposed in 1994, is exempt. Still, its opponents--who float the usual worries about traffic and fault lines and pollution and desecration of Native American grounds, about the doom of the Santa Clara, Southern California’s last wild river--now sing a one-word Cassandra chorus of warning: water.

Although there is not yet enough water for the project, the developer makes ironclad assurances that it will not drain the river or pump agriculture’s ground water--that Newhall Rancherites of 2025 will bathe and drink and swim in mostly recycled water and rainfall runoff, the rest to be purchased, probably from Northern California.

Maybe so. Maybe, in 25 years, when the project is fully built, someone will indeed still be selling water, enough each year to fill the Los Angeles Coliseum eight times over.

But how much will it cost?

During the 1990 drought in Montecito, no poor cousin as cities go, users of the local water system paid arm-and-leg-sized premiums for anything over standard use. It became a gesture of conscience (and frugality) to let your lawn go brown. Yet Montecitans with their own wells watered and showered lavishly, to the polite fury of desiccated neighbors.

If class wars can erupt between the haves and the have-mores, what about 50 million less prosperous future Californians? The mantra that more housing means affordable housing doesn’t envision a family that scrapes up a down payment and moves in--and finds it can’t afford the water to run through the pipes.

There’s another frontier line, chiseled over a state office building in Sacramento: “Give me men to match my mountains.” It’s a fine sentiment--but a visionary would have inscribed, “Give me men to match my water supply.”

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.