After 10-Year Effort, Water Bill Is Still Paddling Upstream

Just as Ahab kept chasing his whale, and Charlie Brown never quit trying to kick that football--even though Lucy would snatch it away at the last second, every time--Randele Kanouse has plugged away for a decade now, trying to see his water bill passed.

“This truly is an obsession,” the 51-year-old lobbyist for East Bay Municipal Utility District cheerfully admitted the other day. He was holding a thick stack of papers--artifacts collected in a quest for what would seem to be, on its face, a rather simple and obvious piece of water policy.

“Here’s the original bill,” Kanouse said, dealing a somewhat faded document from the top of the stack and flipping it onto an office table. Dated Feb. 7, 1991, Assembly Bill 455 consisted of a single sentence, which Kanouse proceeded to read aloud:

No lead agency shall approve a development project unless the applicant identifies a long-term, reliable supply of water to serve the proposed project.

He looked up from his reading.

“Now who could quarrel with that?” he asked.

Who could oppose the notion that new subdivisions or shopping malls or entire “new towns,” as the developers like to call them, should be built only after it is determined there’s an adequate source of water for them?

To answer his own question, Kanouse began tossing down more documents, one after another, until the entire table was covered with paper. These were the original letters of complaint lodged in 1991 by subdividers and strip mall developers, by business associations, architects, trade unions, real estate agencies--by anybody with a stake in preserving business as usual in the building game.

Many were their problems with Kanouse’s one-sentence bill. It was too “vague.” It would trigger an economic downturn, an “exodus” of industry from California. It would stand in the way of local governments and their oh-so-excellent planning policies. It would add “red tape” to the system and inflate housing prices, hobbling the less fortunate in their pursuit of the American Dream.

“The basic premise of this bill, that buildings consume water, is incorrect,” argued one of the more creative critics. “The people who live in these buildings do consume water, but they will continue to consume water whether they live in new homes or old homes, work in new buildings or old buildings. . . .”

The bill had its origins in a “new town,” to be called Dougherty Valley, proposed for Contra Costa County. As the agency that would need to service the town’s 11,000 homes, East Bay MUD took a look and determined that, in a drought, there might not be enough water to go around. After an initial round of litigation, it was decided that the state Legislature might be the best place to make the case that, in California, identifying a reliable water supply should become one of the first tasks of any developer, not an afterthought.

Oddly enough, this was--and is--a rather radical approach to water policy. “Rain will follow the plow” was the prayer of early settlers in California and the West. There was plenty of water, boosters were known to say, but in the wrong places. Out of such beliefs came the common approach of build first, find water later. And for a long time, it worked.

“However,” as Kanouse puts it, “that was then, and this is now.”

Demands on California’s water supplies have grown along with the population and economy. The era of placing big dams on every possible river bend has passed. Moreover, with low-flow toilets, drip irrigation systems and the like, Californians have become more and more adept at making every drop of water count--which only means that, come the next big drought, there will be less potential to squeeze water from the system through conservation.

In fact, throughout this summer, Sacramentans have watched the fast-growing foothill suburb of El Dorado Hills scramble to secure enough water to survive until the rains return, if they return. Last winter produced less than normal rainfall, and apparently that was enough to push the 14,000-population community to the point of going dry.

“El Dorado Hills,” Kanouse said, “is our canary in the mine shaft,” a lesson in what could happen if California continues to disconnect land-use planning and water policy. Not that it has won the day for Kanouse and his crusade.

From the start, Sacramento’s more savvy politicians warned Kanouse that he was up against too many big guns, that he was spitting “into the wind.” Still, he kept at it, session after session, bill after bill. He seemed to do better in dry years than in wet ones, when water debate in California seems to sink beneath the rising reservoir waters.

There was a compromise bill passed in the mid-1990s, asking cities and counties at least to consider water, in a nonbinding way, before they approve development projects. That measure, though, has been largely ignored, and an attempt is underway this session to pass legislation that would close the loopholes.

Kanouse, meanwhile, has a new champion for his cause. State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) is the fifth lawmaker to serve as author for his legislation. She has taken the current version, SB 221, pretty far, shepherding it through the Senate and into the Assembly. After a decade of give-and-take, the one-sentence bill now runs for a dozen pages, attempting to anticipate and dismiss every attack.

Nonetheless, the buzz last week in Capitol hallways was that SB 221 would not be going much further this session. Kanouse already seems to be casting a hopeful eye, once again, toward next year. Support for the basic idea does seem to be building a bit, and who knows? Maybe Kanouse is just one long drought away from landing his whale.