Agency sues over MWD drought plan

An agency that supplies water to 2 million residents of southeast Los Angeles County has filed suit to overturn a new Southern California drought plan, saying it inequitably allocates water and “robs from the poor to pay the cost of new development in more affluent areas.”

The Los Angeles County Superior Court lawsuit brought by the Commerce-based Central Basin Municipal Water District challenges the water allocation plan approved Feb. 12 by the board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District. The MWD is a public agency that distributes imported water to 18 million people from Ventura County to the Mexican border.

During past droughts, the agency has cut water deliveries across the board. The new drought plan, however, sets a formula for determining how imported water would be divided among the region’s cities if current water shortages worsened.

Cities could receive more water if, for instance, they were in growing counties, depended heavily on MWD water or suddenly lost local water supplies. That formula would take precedence over long-standing water rights held by older cities.

The lawsuit contends that the plan, championed by Los Angeles, San Diego and Inland Empire cities, unfairly penalizes the Central Basin’s lower-income, largely Latino communities while benefiting growing inland areas.

The plan would deliver water unfairly “by giving ‘cheap’ water to growing, more affluent water districts and communities, at the expense of poorer water districts and communities,” the complaint says.

It also contends that the MWD board did not perform required state environmental reviews and ignored water rights that favor the older southeast L.A. County cities.

Jeff Kightlinger, MWD general manager, said Thursday that the plan was fair.

“It treats people in Beverly Hills the same way it treats people in Compton, Riverside, Orange County,” he said. “It accounted for population changes to make sure that at the grass-roots level, the retail level, we treated people equally.”

Kightlinger also defended his staff’s decision that the plan was exempt from the state Environmental Quality Act, which can require environmental impact reviews for projects.

“If you did an EIR every time you updated a plan, then you would never proceed,” he said.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spokesman Joe Ramallo said in an e-mail, “We understand the need for the water allocation plan, view it as equitable and do not intend to join in the legal challenge.”

The MWD, the state’s largest water district, imports water from the Colorado River and Northern California and sells it to 26 member agencies, which use it to supplement local groundwater supplies.

Water supplies to Southern California have ebbed in recent years because of an ongoing drought in the Colorado River Basin, last year’s dry weather and sharp cuts in water from the north prompted by a court order protecting the delta smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

So far this year, that order has reduced water flowing south by 30%, MWD officials said Thursday.

The MWD relies heavily on water stored in reservoirs around the state, but those reserves stand at only 38% of normal.

Thursday, the agency issued its first-ever call for reduced landscape irrigation, asking residents to cut outdoor watering at least one day a week.

Kightlinger said the new drought plan would not be used this year “unless something dramatically shifted.”

However, local water managers fear that a federal court decision issued Wednesday, intended to protect endangered salmon and steelhead, could further slash water deliveries, although details will not be known until after more court hearings. This year’s snowpack is smaller than expected, and local rainfall virtually dried up in March.

Central Basin purchases water from the MWD to serve 24 cities as well as other communities in a swath of the county from East Los Angeles to Cerritos, Norwalk, Whittier, East Compton, South Gate and Lakewood. Its board voted last month to mount a legal challenge to the plan.

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deborah.schoch@latimes.com.