Water Talks Send Ripple of Fear North

The clash of Southern California water agencies over the Colorado River is threatening to touch off an even more strident water fight: this one between ever-thirsty Southern California and ever-suspicious Northern California.

In the annals of California water wars, no conflict matches north versus south for acrimony. For newcomers to the Golden State, here’s the short course: The north has the water, the south has the people, and politically powerful forces in the north believe the twain should not meet.

As a proposed deal involving the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and three other agencies over the Colorado River appears to be disintegrating, a growing number of politicians, environmentalists and newspapers in Northern California fear that the MWD will turn northward for more water.

For many in the north, that prospect serves as a rallying cry to put aside intramural differences and mount a defense against a common enemy.

“The north-south rivalry, and the sense that it’s ‘our’ water and that Southern California wants it, is always alive, just below the surface,” said Thomas Graff, attorney for the Oakland-based Environmental Defense, a force in California water issues.

Late Thursday, Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla (D-Pittsburg), chairman of the Assembly water committee, announced he was planning hearings to expose what he sees as a destructive proposal by the MWD to take more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta through the California Aqueduct.

Canciamilla joined those who angrily accuse the MWD of trying to kill the Colorado River deal. They say its purpose was to maintain the agency’s dominance over distribution of water allocations for urban and suburban agencies and to prevent San Diego, its biggest customer, from throwing off its dependence on the MWD for nearly all its water purchases.

Though the threat of retaliatory legislation is nothing new in water matters -- and few anti-MWD bills have survived the legislative process -- the Canciamilla announcement put the MWD on the defensive.

MWD officials quickly responded that, even as their district was being accused of coveting more water from Northern California, the district was actually signing an agreement to provide water to help the Chinook salmon of Northern California’s lower Klamath River.

“This idea that Southern California is going to ravage the north or the Colorado River is out of date,” said MWD Vice President Adan Ortega. “We don’t think Assemblyman Canciamilla understands that 53% of our demand is satisfied by recycling, conservation and recovery, not from the Colorado or Northern California.”

In an agreement signed Friday, the MWD authorized the federal government to release as much as 50,000 acre-feet of water owned by the MWD and stored in the Shasta Reservoir. The water, purchased by the MWD from Northern California rice farmers, will help raise the level of the lower Klamath, protecting the imperiled salmon population.

Canciamilla’s announcement was made within minutes of a joint denunciation of the MWD issued by the San Diego County Water Authority, the Coachella Valley Water District and the Imperial Irrigation District.

The three smaller agencies accuse the MWD of deliberately sabotaging a proposed deal between Imperial and San Diego, a deal thought by state and federal officials to be crucial in getting Southern California to live within a water budget.

MWD officials disagree with that assessment. The dispute centers on matters of money and hydrology. The two sides differ over how to pay for saving the Salton Sea and who is more realistically calculating how much surplus Colorado River water will be available for coastal Southern California.

Negotiations are set to resume this week, with mediation by former Assemblyman Richard Katz, the governor’s top water advisor.

In a statement released after negotiations in Sacramento broke down last week, the strongest sentiment may have been one in a matter-of-fact tone.

Imperial’s lead attorney, John Carter, one of the state’s most respected lawyers in the arcane field of water law and water politics, said he suspected that the MWD had a backup plan to take effect once it scuttled the San Diego-Imperial deal: seeking use of the MWD’s Colorado Aqueduct to bring some of Imperial’s share of the Colorado River to San Diego.

“Metropolitan has already demonstrated where they must go to replace these lost Colorado River supplies: the fragile Bay Delta and the Central Valley,” Carter said.

Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Las Vegas-based Southern Nevada Water Authority, went further. The MWD, she charged, planned to “drain” Northern California.

By day’s end, Canciamilla had made his announcement and the polarization over water matters had resumed.

“It’s hard for Northern Californians to be cooperative if they think Southern Californians aren’t getting their act together,” Graff said.

The 738,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which provides drinking water for 22 million Californians and is vital to the state’s agricultural economy, has long been the flash point in the north-south feud.

Seen from the south, it’s the bottleneck that keeps Southern California from getting as much water from the north as it was promised when voters endorsed construction of the California Aqueduct in 1960. Seen from the north, it is an environmentally fragile resource that could be further damaged if more water were pumped out to be sent south through the aqueduct.

For half a century, Republican and Democratic governors alike have suggested that a so-called “peripheral canal” be built, looping around the delta to connect the Sacramento River to the State Water Project and its north-south canal. The north has been passionately opposed to that idea.