U.S. Backs MWD Over Davis in Storage Dispute

The Bush administration sided Wednesday with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in its high-stakes confrontation with Gov. Gray Davis and pledged to prevent $10 million in water purchased by the agency from being dumped into the sea.

In a letter to Davis, Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley, the administration’s top official on Western water issues, said the federal government will help store the water, enough to serve 200,000 people for a year, in a federal reservoir rather than see it flow into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and on to the sea. The water would otherwise be lost because the Davis administration has rejected MWD’s request to use the state’s Lake Oroville reservoir north of Sacramento.

“The demands for water within California are simply too great for us not to make every effort to put this water to good use,” Raley wrote.

A spokesman for Davis said Wednesday that the governor welcomed the federal intervention but had no plans to back down on the decision to deny MWD the right to store water at Lake Oroville.

At issue is 100,000 acre-feet of water that MWD has agreed to purchase from farmers in Northern California. Under the one-year deal, MWD envisioned storing the water in Lake Oroville and then shipping it south during “dry” years, via the California Aqueduct.

But on Wednesday, the governor’s office announced that it would not permit the water to be stored in the reservoir and that, as a result, the water would be allowed to flow into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and out to San Francisco Bay and the ocean.

MWD officials immediately charged that the state action was meant to pressure the Southern California agency into approving another controversial deal. That deal, which is stalled, would call for the San Diego County Water Authority to buy water from the Imperial Irrigation District, which enjoys a larger share of Colorado River water than any other agency in the seven states that depend on the river.

MWD Vice President Adan Ortega accused the state of “fabricating a water crisis” to force MWD to sign off on the arrangement to send unused Imperial agricultural water to the thirsty San Diego coast.

The governing board of the mega-agency, which provides water to 16 million people in six Southern California counties, is set to discuss the contentious and complex issue next week. Also, MWD lawyers are researching the agency’s rights to the storage, as the largest user of the California Aqueduct.

Davis spokesman Byron Tucker denied that the governor is trying to pressure MWD but conceded that Davis is “disappointed” with the water giant over its lack of support for the San Diego-Imperial deal.

Tucker said the request to store the water at Oroville had been rejected because the reservoir is full. MWD officials agreed that the reservoir is full but said that it would have room later in the summer. MWD officials said the water is not needed for the coming year but might be needed in years when there is inadequate rainfall and snowpack to supply Southern California.

The reservoir decision, which reverses an early arrangement to permit use of the reservoir, comes amid rising tension between MWD and the governor.

“Certainly this administration has been disappointed in the actions MWD has taken that are derailing the Colorado River agreement,” Tucker said. “You can’t take actions derailing that agreement and then ask for places to store water.”

Asked about Raley’s letter, Tucker said, “We welcome any effort by the Department of Interior to store any California water in federal facilities.... But we cannot give MWD dedicated capacity because MWD overbought water. It is not fair, and it will not be done.”

Tucker said MWD is asking for “favored treatment” that would not be fair to other California water agencies that might like to store water in the reservoir. The Davis administration, like its Republican predecessor, backs the idea of San Diego’s buying water from the vast supplies of the Imperial Irrigation District.

But, among other concerns, MWD board members have questioned the wisdom of a proposal to spend $200 million in state bond funds to fix some of the environmental problems of the Salton Sea, the smelly body of water that straddles the Imperial-Riverside county line.

The sea, which has no major source of fresh water, survives because of agricultural runoff. The proposed sale of water from Imperial to San Diego would decrease the amount of that runoff and thus exacerbate the sea’s rising salinity.

Federal law requires that parties to a water deal mitigate any environmental damage done by such a sale. For that reason, the San Diego-Imperial deal cannot be completed until at least a partial solution to the Salton Sea problem is reached.

In San Diego, the MWD’s concern about the state bond funds is seen as a smokescreen to hide the bigger agency’s opposition to the San Diego-Imperial deal. The San Diego County Water Authority is MWD’s biggest and unhappiest customer; if it buys water from the Imperial Valley, it would reduce its dependence on MWD and decrease the amount it pays annually to the Los Angeles-based agency.

San Diego water officials quickly sided with the state in its rejection of MWD’s request to store water at Lake Oroville.

“It’s preposterous,” said Dennis Cushman, assistant general manager of the water authority. “They purchased a car and had no arrangement to take delivery.”

Cushman said San Diego water officials believe that MWD decided to buy water from the Northern California farmers so that it could assert that the San Diego-Imperial deal was not needed to meet the region’s water needs.

Raley said the federal Bureau of Reclamation is devising a plan to have the Northern California water stored in the federally run reservoir at Lake Shasta.

And he suggested that by denying MWD the right to store water at Oroville the Davis administration is courting a backlash from other states that depend on the Colorado. Those states have been increasingly angry at California for using more than its entitlement to the river, which is governed by a complex set of legislative actions, court decisions and bureaucratic regulations.

Raley wrote that other states will find it difficult to understand why they should “continue to make extraordinary efforts to secure extra water for California from the drought-stricken Colorado River basin.”