No Shortages Are Expected, MWD Says

Officials of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the regional agency that supplies water to 17 million people in six counties, said Friday that the district could avoid shortages, even if new predictions of continued drought along the Colorado River proved accurate.

“We believe we can more than manage the circumstances” if drought forces an end to “surplus” allocations from the river, said MWD Vice President Adan Ortega.

Ortega’s comments came as Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley, the top water official in the Bush administration, warned in a speech in Las Vegas that the federal government could be forced to stop surplus allocations to California by January 2005 if drought persists.

After five years of drought, Lake Mead, the giant reservoir behind Hoover Dam, is at its lowest point since 1968, Raley told an annual gathering of 900 officials from seven states that depend on the Colorado River.

There is enough water for surplus next year but probably not in 2005, Raley said.

“Given the population growth in the Southwest, this reduction will especially impact municipal users in Southern California and here in Nevada,” said Raley, delivering a speech for his boss, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who was unable to attend.

In Los Angeles, Ortega noted that the MWD had not received surplus allocations this year and had managed to compensate through conservation, increased storage and purchases of water from Northern California.

The surplus allocations were ended by the federal government in January when the MWD and three other Southern California agencies were unable to meet a deadline for forging a water deal to help the state live within its entitlement.

After further negotiations, a deal was reached and signed Oct. 16.

One inducement from the Department of the Interior for the four agencies to compromise was the promise that surplus water would again be available.

In recent years California has received as much as 800,000 acre-feet of surplus water each year above its entitlement of 4.4 million acre-feet.

Officials from other western states have pressured the federal government to rein in California’s consumption.

The Oct. 16 agreement was meant to ensure that California could resume getting surplus allocations for 13 years as it reduces its reliance on the Colorado River, an approach known as a “soft landing.”

Cutting off surplus water in 2005 is called a “hard landing.”

In predictions released this week, federal hydrologists say the “soft” approach may not be possible, with Lake Mead continuing to shrink.

“We’ve long known this would be the case,” Ortega said.

The prospect that the MWD might look northward for more water has drawn criticism from some environmental groups based in Northern California. North-south disputes over water have long been among the most heated of California’s political battles.

Thomas Graff, California regional director for the California chapter of Environmental Defense, warned in testimony submitted last month to Congress that, without the “soft” approach, “Southern California can be expected to demand very substantially increased amounts of water” in coming years from the San Francisco Bay area and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Ortega, however, said that Graff was being overly alarmist.

Among other things, he said that any water that the MWD acquired from Northern California would be through voluntary purchases from farmers and others with excess water.