State, Local Spats Set a Water War on the Boil

Those of you who are fans of the adolescent roughhousing that passes for politics in Sacramento these days -- and who isn’t? -- may have been lately misled into thinking that the state budget battle is the best show in town.

But I’d like to turn your attention to a truly ugly breach of the peace taking place somewhat out of radar range. This one involves Gov. Gray Davis and the largest municipal water agency in the state, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. For invective, innuendo, saber-rattling, economic significance and all-around squalor it may well shame all other bouts.

The fight intensified last week when an aide to the governor observed that, largely out of pique with the MWD, the state was prepared to take $10-million worth of surplus Sacramento Valley water that the district had purchased and dump it into the sea, rather than hold it in a state reservoir in Oroville. The concern, one aide said, was that the MWD “was not being part of a statewide solution” to California’s water-supply problem.

The MWD cried politics, and by week’s end the governor had backed off. Possibly he was influenced by a crisply-worded letter he received from a U.S. Interior Department official who pronounced himself “very troubled” by even the hint that California would discard usable water merely to teach a lesson to a refractory regional agency. This was especially so since the feds had been leaning over backward to deliver additional water from the Colorado River to the state, the official wrote, sounding very much like a playground chaperon coming just this close to whacking a disorderly pupil with a clipboard.

Davis expressed gratitude for the feds’ offer of storage capacity at their Shasta Reservoir and tried generally to quell talk of letting finite resources dribble away.

“I’ve essentially overruled my subordinates,” the governor told me late last week. “The MWD bought the water in good faith, and sometime, somehow, we will get the water to them.”

Still, if anyone out there thinks that all the entities squabbling over California water policy have now heard a wake-up call and are willing to break bread together, forget it.

The casus belli underlying the most recent bitterness is a multilateral agreement governing the apportionment among several local entities of surplus flows from the Colorado River -- a surplus that in the past has provided as much as 20% of Southern California’s water. The agreement requires the assent of the MWD, the city of San Diego and two irrigation districts that are being asked to free up large quantities of river water for sale to urban users, in part by regularly fallowing cropland.

The agreement is a crucial element of the so-called 4.4 plan, which is California’s pledge to wean itself from the Colorado River surplus over the next 15 years so that neighboring states can have their full share. (The state’s legal allocation of river water, not counting the surplus, is 4.4 million acre-feet a year.)

Even absent any new pressure points, the feuds among the MWD, San Diego Water Authority and neighboring farmers are so numerous and contentious that the State Department could use the region as a training camp before sending its diplomats to manage conflicts in places like the Middle East.

Internal Strife

The disputes are playing out against the backdrop of California’s traditional intrastate bickering over water, which is old enough to have been written into the state constitution. (One of the most memorable drawings ever produced by The Times’ famed cartoonist Paul Conrad appeared in 1982, after Northern California votes soundly defeated the Peripheral Canal project, which was designed to carry water south. The cartoon showed a hulking, cigar-smoking figure labeled “Northern California” standing on a map of the state and urinating toward Los Angeles.)

Now throw in the Salton Sea, the briny inland sink that is California’s largest lake and an important habitat for migratory birds. The sea is fed by agricultural runoff, so the large-scale diversions from Imperial Valley farmland to San Diego would shrink its area and turn it saltier.

The resulting dust would create air pollution, and the rising salinity would drive off wildlife. To assuage the irrigation districts’ concerns that they would be blamed for the devastation, the state kicked in money to “mitigate” damage and develop long-term fixes as part of an

appropriation of more than

$200 million from Proposition 50, the $3.4-billion water bond passed by the voters last fall.

That didn’t end the quarreling over the proposed agreement, however. The unresolved battle so exasperated the Interior Department that it set last Dec. 31 as a deadline for the parties to reach a deal or face a shut-off of access to the Colorado River surplus.

A series of marathon negotiations produced a four-way accord that fell apart, as though on schedule, at the last minute, thanks to objections from the Imperial Irrigation District. Interior promptly turned off the spigot, which reduced MWD’s water supply from the river by about half and forced it, among other things, to buy Sacramento Valley water.

Free-for-All

Another round of negotiations produced another tentative agreement. But now it’s the MWD that objects.

The district’s chief executive, Ronald Gastelum, notes that its estimates of the available surplus from the Colorado River over the next 15 years have shrunk considerably, thanks to a four-year drought in the watershed. He questions the wisdom of the state spending $200 million to support the four-way agreement, when the money might be better spent developing local water supplies via reclamation, recycling, conservation and desalination programs -- strategies, he says, that conform better to the rationale by which the voters approved Proposition 50, anyway.

Not surprisingly, the MWD’s position has provoked a free-for-all in which most of the parties apparently feel free to impugn the others’ motives.

San Diego, which has long chafed in the role of MWD’s biggest and, it believes, most disrespected customer, thinks the district is out to torpedo a deal that would give it some independence from MWD supply.

The governor’s people have also suggested that the MWD doesn’t want to sign an agreement that cuts into its stature as the big dog of the water biz in Southern California. They hint further that feuding with everyone else is so ingrained in some people at the district that they’re no more capable of reconciling with the other agencies than the Montagues were with the Capulets.

It does seem that something about the MWD gets under Gov. Davis’ skin.

He lit out after the district in a 1999 interview with my colleague George Skelton, calling it “the most ineffective organization on the planet Earth” and suggesting it should be “put out of its misery.” (The issue then was a dispute between, yes, the MWD and the San Diego Water Authority, which illustrates the dictum that, in California, there is something more eternal than death and taxes.)

When I asked last week if he still felt the same way, Davis replied: “Clearly, the Met is the reason we don’t have a 4.4 agreement today. Sometimes their arguments are valid; sometimes they’re just stalling.”

He also suggested that the MWD was out of line for questioning the allocation of the $200 million from Proposition 50. “That’s a decision for the state to make,” he said, tersely.

In any case, the standoff finally led last week to the Oroville incident. Back in February, with the Colorado surplus still under lock and key, the MWD had cut a deal with Sacramento Valley rice farmers to divert 100,000 acre-feet of water worth about $10 million, which would become available from Sierra snowmelts this summer. (An acre-foot is about enough to supply two households for a year.) The district had a conditional agreement to store the water in Lake Oroville, north of Sacramento, until it could be shipped south by aqueduct to relieve a dry spell.

April’s surprise rainstorms, however, filled Oroville to the brim, putting in doubt whether it would have sufficient storage capacity for the MWD’s water. (The district says it still believes the reservoir level will drop enough through the summer to accommodate its supply.)

Davis’ deputies exploited the unexpected rainfall to hammer the MWD relentlessly for incompetent planning in having paid lavishly for water without first finding a place to park it. That would be just politics. But they also hinted that even if Oroville were available, they might not allow it to be used. The reasoning here, as one aide told me, was that the state shouldn’t help the MWD secure a backup plan to a Colorado River agreement that the MWD itself is trying to kill.

And so goes the course of water policy in California.

No one ever said it would be easy, considering the number and scale of divergent interests seeking control over a scarce resource. But on some of these issues, such as whether to preserve $10 million worth of water or dump it, the contending parties are not so far apart that people of goodwill couldn’t solve them in a couple of minutes of courteous discussion.

Davis says he recognizes this, and he has called all the disputatious factions to a meeting in Sacramento today to hash things out. “I want a firsthand glimpse of the negotiations myself,” he says.

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at golden.state@latimes.com.