ASSOCIATED PRESS

23-Nov-1998 Monday

SAN FRANCISCO -- California will face an ecological crisis if environmentalists, farmers and urban planners don't come up with a water plan soon, says U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

If talks over water issues collapse, "we'll just stagger along and everyone continues to quarrel, there'll be an ecological crisis in the Delta, fish runs crash toward extinction, and at some point the Endangered Species Act

comes into play . . . and you just start shutting down water users," Babbitt said.

"That's the upside of the downside. In the next drought, things will really get nasty," he told the San Francisco Examiner in an article published yesterday.

That threat compels Babbitt to fly out to California at least once a week to talk about water.

In May, Babbitt assumed leadership of the CalFed Bay-Delta Program, a partnership of 14 state and federal agencies initiated in 1995 to come up with a water plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay.

The Bay-Delta water system is home to 750 species of wildlife and plants, state environmental officials say. It is also the hub of the supply that irrigates California's trillion-dollar agricultural economy and provides water to two-thirds of Californians.

Now, California has a once-in-a-generation chance to change a system that has produced half a century of contention, decimated fisheries and reduced rivers to trickles, said Babbitt.

A next-to-final draft of a water plan is expected by the end of the year.

"It's one of those off moments in which everybody has begun to see that although they have veto power to jam the system, finally they have come face to face with the fact that we could all be ahead by putting this consensus together," Babbitt said.

The battle lines in the water wars are most sharply drawn between farmers and environmentalists.

"A lot of these issues that you folks have drifted into in the last 30 or 40 years are sort of a Kabuki drama, where everybody puts on their uniforms and assumes sort of previously written roles," Babbitt said.

Farmers say they need more surface storage to guarantee a reliable water supply, but environmentalists say dams already have overburdened the state's ecosystems.

"That's where we're stuck," said Ronnie Cohen of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Babbitt said the deal would not include new storage facilities without strong assurances about conservation, water transfers and marketing.

That kind of skilled negotiation -- helped by his training as a geologist and lawyer, as well as his experience reforming Arizona's water laws as that state's governor -- has given both sides hope of a compromise, they said.

Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co.