By Gordon Smith
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE

December 9, 1998

That is one 'vision of future' among 11 offered

LOS ANGELES -- No thunder clapped, no birds fell from the sky.

But something almost as remarkable happened at yesterday's monthly board meeting of the Metropolitan Water District: the agency's directors began considering whether the once-mighty Met should be phased out of existence.

The directors, all 51 of them, got their first peek at 11 different possible "visions" of the future, cobbled together by outside consultants after months of interviews with board members, state legislators, environmentalists and other water experts.

The plans range from extending the Met's control over all water resources in the region -- a move that would greatly strengthen its political clout -- to auctioning off its reservoirs, pipelines and even its water rights to various bidders.

Other scenarios include becoming a state agency, or nothing more than one of many water wholesalers in an increasingly crowded market. The Met's board is slated to choose a single alternative by March.

Soul-searching of this order is a radical departure for the Met, which during its 70-year existence has monopolized distribution of the imported water that has keyed decades of growth throughout Southern California.

The institution doled out the precious liquid to its 27 member agencies -- including the San Diego County Water Authority, its largest customer -- and brooked no competition.

Now, however, the Met's dominance, its structure and even its water supply are being challenged on three sides.

To the south, the San Diego County Water Authority has won a battle to import its own water from the Imperial Valley via the Met's Colorado River Aqueduct. An agreement between the authority and the Met was approved Nov. 10.

Meanwhile, to the east, rapidly growing Arizona and Nevada are demanding Colorado River water that they long relinquished to the Met.

And to the north, hopes for additional water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are fading, even as pressure from environmentalists and state legislators has helped force the Met to begin crafting a new strategic plan that will reflect the changes mounting on all sides.

Add to that a newly elected board chairman -- Phillip Pace of the Central Basin Municipal Water District in southeast Los Angeles County -- and the resignation of longtime General Manager John Wodraska three months ago, and you have a picture of an agency in transition.

"The Met is at a pivotal place right now, challenged by major changes in its leadership and the whole direction of the management," says David Abel, publisher of the Metro Investment Report in Los Angeles.

"Do they build on the momentum and precedent-setting decisions they've made in the last couple of months, or do they find themselves going down a tributary over crisis of leadership and cohesion of direction.

"It's probably the biggest decision facing Southern California in the next 20 years," Abel continues. "As the state grows from 35 million people to 50 million or more, water may become more valuable than gold."

Along with many other observers, Abel believes the biggest changes will stem from the agreement between the Met and the San Diego County Water Authority.

The so-called water transfer to San Diego from the Imperial Irrigation District, using the Met's pipes and other facilities, could set the stage for similar transfers between other water districts -- and almost certainly among those agencies and an increasing number of private water companies, too.

Such transfers are liable to be a crucial way for cities to supplement their water supplies in the future.

But they would mark a sea change from the Met's traditional approach of augmenting supplies by building costly aqueducts to import water, and immense reservoirs to store it.

Where would this new approach leave the Met?

From its current role as the sole supplier of imported water in Southern California, it could splinter into several agencies or wind up as nothing more than a system of pipes and reservoirs that other agencies use for swapping water, says Roy Wolfe, the Met's manager for strategic planning.

Currently, 16 million people living in San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Ventura counties obtain 60 percent of their drinking water from the Met. (The balance comes from local wells and the city of Los Angeles' Owens Valley Aqueduct.)

San Diego County relies even more heavily on the Met, which furnishes up to 90 percent of the county's water -- not only for drinking but for lawns and gardens, too. Without it, hotels, manufacturing plants, theme parks and countless other businesses would close.

The agency's life-support tendrils extend long distances in two directions: eastward along the 242-mile-long Colorado River Aqueduct, and northward some 444 miles via the California Aqueduct to the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta.

This water from afar is pumped through 775 miles of pipelines, stored in eight reservoirs scattered around the region, and treated at five mammoth filtration plants -- a $6 billion system built piece by piece since 1928.

But the Met's supply lines have increasingly been squeezed.

Off and on since 1965, the agency has drawn 1.2 million acre-feet of water annually -- roughly double its allotment -- from the Colorado River by pumping surplus water along with a hefty amount that Nevada and Arizona were legally entitled to but haven't used.

Now those states want their full share, even as engineers are planning for drier years from Mother Nature.

Within five years the Met will have to cope with only 656,000 acre-feet of water from the river each year (an acre-foot is enough water to supply two families of four for a year).

At the same time, hopes of augmenting the 700,000 to 800,000 acre-feet that the Met draws annually from Northern California's Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta are waning.

The multi-agency CalFed Bay Delta Project, which oversees the ecology of the huge estuary, recently postponed a decision on building a canal around the eastern edge of the Delta -- a canal that the Met and its supporters view as the only way to enable the Met to someday take its full entitlement of 2 million acre-feet of Delta water.

All of that has left the Met -- committed to supplying its member agencies in Southern California with all the water they need -- with a dwindling set of options.

Water transfers

In recent years it has embarked on a variety of conservation and reclamation programs.

But most experts see water transfers as a more significant source of water for the future.

Among other things, the transfers could decentralize the water market -- changes similar to those that have swept the electric-power industry in the wake of deregulation, explains Steve Erie, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego.

Eventually, the Met's 27 member agencies could cut their own deals with public and private water producers around the West, and use the Met's pipes to transfer the water.

Michael George, president of the Western Water Company in San Diego, points out that with the Met's supplies increasingly constricted, many of its member agencies see cutting their own deals as the only way to ensure additional water for the future.

"People want control of their destiny, to mitigate risk, to assure their growth," he says.

Besides, the transfers will be a more efficient way of getting water to consumers, he argues -- and easier on the environment than building huge new reservoirs and aqueducts.

In what could be a sign of the coming changes, Western Water is negotiating an agreement to sell water from its property in Northern California's Yuba County to a Southern California water district via the Met's system.

Public input solicited

Against that backdrop, the Met has embarked on a planning process to redefine its mission. Public input for the new strategic plan will be solicited at separate meetings next month in Encinitas and Pasadena.

A key issue, says the Met's Wolfe, is whether the Met will try to protect its monopoly on imported water -- as it seemed to during the long, acrimonious negotiations with the San Diego County Water Authority -- or will embrace a new role along with water transfers.

Things could still go either way, insists Christine Frahm, the board chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority and one of that agency's six representatives on the Met's board.

The authority's agreement with the Met to transfer water from the Imperial Valley is so specific that it sets virtually no precedent on water transfers for other districts, she says.

Nevertheless, Frahm adds, come what may, the Met won't devolve into merely a set of pipes anytime soon. Even if water transfers do become widespread, some member agencies won't have the clout or the desire to negotiate agreements on their own, and are likely to rely on the Met to cut bigger deals to benefit them, she says.

Pace, the Met's incoming board chairman, says that getting water transfers to work within the agency's framework will be his biggest challenge. But certain change lies ahead because the water market has altered dramatically, he adds.

The Met is obligated to generate enough water to supply 3 million more people in Southern California by 2010, without building new facilities, he points out.

"How are we going to do it?" Pace asks rhetorically. "We're going to do it by conservation, reclamation and water transfers."

Copyright 1998 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.