Visitors to Rough & Tumble, the insider-beloved news aggregator devoted to California politics and government, generally see two or three flashing ads under its masthead. This month, two are always on view. One touts the Cabinet Report education website. The other asks, “Is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Over-Charging You?” Those who click on the latter ad are taken to a website run by the San Diego water agency, mwdfacts.com, packed with unflattering reports about MWD, its leaders and its history.

You could call it a 21st-century version of “Chinatown” — hardball water politics going places no one has gone before.

MWD targeted San Diego officials at least twice

The MWD-San Diego feud began in the early 1990s when San Diego officials responded to being squeezed on supplies during a severe drought by seeking to hugely diversify where they got water, starting with obtaining some of the massive allotment going to agriculture in Imperial County. MWD took this decision from its largest client as an outrageous affront and launched what the Los Angeles Times later called a “clandestine effort to discredit San Diego County water leaders,” a well-funded campaign in which communications firms were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to push stories that the county agency was betraying its residents by forcing them to pay more for water than necessary.

San Diego County Water Authority leaders also alleged that MWD had launched another conspiratorial campaign against the agency more recently. In 2014, documents obtained by the authority showed MWD had orchestrated one of its member agencies’ public-relations campaign against the San Diego agency while denying involvement.

The San Diego County Water Authority was 95 percent reliant on MWD supplies in 1991. This year, it says 49 percent of the water it delivers to 3.2 million people comes from MWD, and that figure will drop even more in coming months when the Carlsbad desalination plant, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, goes online. MWD has never wavered from its primary criticism of the San Diego approach: that it forces customers to use much more expensive supplies without solid reasons.

Filling reservoirs during a drought

But the San Diego agency’s record in dealing with the state’s lengthy drought has made charges of incompetence tough to stick. The only reason the San Diego region is making big cuts in water usage is because Gov. Jerry Brown issued a statewide decree. The San Diego County agency announced this spring that it believed it had supplies to cover 99 percent of normal demand in fiscal 2016, which started July 1. This fact, combined with the state-mandated reduction in water use, has led to an unusual phenomenon: One of California’s largest water agencies is steadily filling its reservoirs in the middle of a historic and destructive drought.

The San Diego agency has also enjoyed legal success against MWD after years of claims of systematic overcharging. In a preliminary judgment issued in July and ratified in August, a San Francisco Superior Court judge awarded the the county water authority $188.3 million plus interest for MWD overcharges from 2011-2014. An MWD appeal is considered a certainty.

… mid- and late-1990s fight between the San Diego County Water Authority and MWD over the authority’s interest in securing new water supplies from Imperial County. MWD secretively paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a public relations firm for what the Los Angeles Times called a “clandestine effort to discredit San Diego County water leaders.”

That’s from what I wrote a few years ago in chronicling all MWD’s machinations. We could soon see more. San Diego city leaders have joined with environmentalists in embracing a plan that would allow for thoroughly retreated wastewater to be used in city water supplies. In 20 years, officials say, this could supply 83 million gallons of water a day — one-third of the city’s needs.

This could set a precedent for not just other California cities but the world. It’s a far bigger threat to MWD’s hegemony over its 19 million customers from San Diego to Riverside to Santa Barbara than the San Diego County Water Authority’s deal in the 1990s to secure water from the Imperial Irrigation District.

So don’t be surprised if we soon see ad campaigns sponsored by previously unheard of groups popping up around Southern California warning of the perils of “toilet to tap.”

I’m not kidding. Self-serving arrogance is in the MWD’s DNA.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic movie, “Chinatown,” was inspired by California’s water wars of almost a century ago.  A modern day version of the movie seems to be playing out in California’s proposed bullet train and Delta Tunnels projects over who will get the “wealth effect” from these massive public works projects.

The real life back story to “Chinatown” was how Harry Chandler, whose family owned the Los Angeles Times until recently, used his paper to promote water bond issues for the Los Angeles Aqueduct.  The water would eventually pump up land values in San Fernando Valley, where Chandler owned huge holdings.

Timothy Egan, who lives in the Pacific Northwest and writes a weekly column, “The Opinionator,” for the New York Times, thinks the modern day versions of such public works projects will restore the “California Dream.”  Egan wrote in a recent column, “California Beaming,” that the proposed bullet train and Delta Tunnels projects will make California more “livable.”

Delta tunnels as a backfill operation

Egan seems to have only remote knowledge of California’s situation.  First of all, re-plumbing California’s Delta water system won’t do much to meet the needs of the population growth Egan describes in California.

Sure there is population growth in California.  But the rapid growth of past decades is gone. Currently there is slow and unbalanced growth. It looks like there might not be enough young, self-sufficient families to generate taxes for the one-third of all national welfare recipients who live here.

Most of the public doesn’t realize that bringing more water to Southern California through two huge tubes under the Sacramento Delta may not spur that much growth.  That is because the tunnels would partly backfill water lost due to Arizona’s decision finally to take their full share of water under the Colorado River Compact.

Bullet Train as California Dreamin’ 

Subsidized commuter train projects are always economic losers no matter if they are local light rail projects or an intra-state commuter train between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  That is because commuter rail projects are built for the positive side effects they create around transportation nodes of tourism, new commercial businesses and housing developments.

But the cost to taxpayers is large. For example, Forbes reported of Phoenix’s new light-rail system, “[T]he taxpayers must chip in $25 million of general revenue to subsidize operations, or $1,250 per daily rider per year.” It “replaced roads that can carry 6,000 trips per hour with train tracks carrying perhaps 2,200 trips per hour, not to mention adding further congestion to remaining roads when cars have to yield the right-of-way to trains.”

How about energy savings, the best selling point of rail systems? “In terms of energy use, the best source of data for analyzing light rail efficiency is annual data turned into the Department of Transportation;  unfortunately, no full-year energy use data has been submitted yet for Phoenix.  But we can look to other similar systems to make an educated guess.  Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute looked at energy use in a number of light rail systems, and he found the average energy use in BTU’s per passenger mile for all light rail systems to actually be above that for driving passenger cars. While trains are far more efficient than cars when full, most of the time trains do not run full, and even at rush hour half the trains (those running against the typical commute direction) are using a lot more energy to move steel than passengers.”

No one is predicting that California’s bullet train will run cars brimming with passengers.

Return of redevelopment

Local communities like light rail because it creates an increased tax base from new transit-oriented housing that circumvents the tax reassessment restrictions of Proposition 13.

For some 150 years, trains have historically spurred indirect growth in communities wherever the trains stopped.  Redevelopment died in California in 2011.  But it is being brought back to life in other guises such as a bullet train that supposedly rebuilds communities and reawakens the California Dream.

But a bullet train is unlikely to create housing re-development around its train stops, as has light rail.  If it did, AMTRAK, which already provides long-range commuter service throughout California, would have spurred such development.  A San Francisco-Los Angeles bullet train would just take jobs from commuter airplane flights between the two cities.  It would be unlikely that San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield and Palmdale would benefit from increase property tax bases due to transit-oriented real estate development.

It’s for such reasons that former state Sen. Quentin Kopp, who helped jump-start the bullet train project a decade ago, now opposes it. “They have just mangled this project,” Kopp said. “They distorted it. We don’t get a high-speed rail system. It is the great train robbery.”

So why is the bullet train going forward? To adapt a famous line from “Chinatown”: “Forget it, Jake, it’s California.”

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Remember “Chinatown,” the murky 1974 movie about the water wars in the Los Angeles Basin in the 1930s, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway?

A January 18 California appeals court water rights case is reminiscent of the multilayered plots and subplots in the flick.

The “Chinatown” movie plot involves fictional character Hollis Mulwray who is  murdered due to his opposition to the proposed construction of a new dam.  The fictional Mulwray is based on the real historical person of William Mulholland, the infamous head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who allegedly stole water from Mono Lake in Northern California in the early 20th Century.

But the current court case is not like the movie “Chinatown” in one important aspect. There is no sex involved in the putting in and taking out of water from the Los Angeles Central Basin Water District water basin that is the focus of this court case. But there is alleged bureaucratic bigamy and robbery.

Quoted in the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper, Long Beach City Water Department Director Kevin Wattier succinctly summed up the main issue in the case, “Right now it’s like a bank account where you can put money in but can’t take it out.”

The legal citation for the current case is Water Replenishment District of Southern California versus the City of Cerritos, Case No. B226743, Second District Court of Appeals, filed Jan. 18, 2012.

The Plaintiffs

The original complainants (plaintiffs) were five cities and a regional water replenishment district: Long Beach, Lakewood, Los Angeles, Huntington Park and Vernon; and the Water Replenishment District of Southern California.

A water replenishment district is a special agency of government that recharges underground water supplies from natural rainwater runoff captured from a local watershed.  In this case the water recharge basins are adjacent to the upper San Gabriel River and the 605 Freeway in Los Angeles County.  And the watershed involved is the San Gabriel Mountain and River watershed.

All the cities involved in the case are located downstream of the water recharge basins.  Long Beach is located near the mouth of the San Gabriel River to the Pacific Ocean. A map of the cities along the San Gabriel River can be found here.

The Defendants

The defendants (respondents) are three cities and one sub-regional water agency: the cities of Cerritos, Downey and Signal Hill, together with the Central Basin Municipal Water District.  The Central Water Basin is obviously located near the center of the land surface of the Los Angeles urban basin.

While there is no sex involved in this case, there is bureaucratic bigamy and alleged robbery: all of the parties to the case share the same underground water basin.  In fact, the Water Replenishment District was created to refill the Central and West Coast underground water storage basins.  There has been a history of court cases in the Central Basin alleging “overdrafting.”  That is water terminology for “highway robbery.”

The History of the Central Basin Water Wars

The Central Basin has a 277-square-mile underground footprint.  If the basin were square shaped, it would comprise an area of about 16.5 miles by 16.5 miles. The Central Basin serves city water departments, unincorporated areas, private water companies, school districts, electric utilities and landowners.  The Central Basin Water District sells treated water to cities and others within its regional service area. Like the movie “Chinatown,” water is a many-layered story.  There are no murders but there are plenty of complex water wars.

Going back to 1965, a court ordered that 500 parties having water rights in the Central Basin were subject to limits as to how much water they could take to prevent overdrafts.

In 2001, several interested parties sought unused storage space in the Central Basin.  A court appointed the California Department of Water Resources to serve as “watermaster,” or water traffic cop.  But at that time, the court rejected the legal notion that the right to extract water creates a concurrent right to store water.

By 2009, another group of water pumpers bubbled up. They filed a court action to use 330,000 acre-feet of “dewatered space” in the Central Basin for future water storage.  This would be enough water for about 660,000 households per year. This action sought even more layers of complexity: three “watermasters” were to be appointed.

The trial court issued an order on July 7, 2010. The order said it only had authorization to apportion water rights and not rights to unused capacity space in the Central Basin.  Additionally, the court believed it could not appoint “watermasters” over unused space in the basin that held no water today. The Water Replenishment District of Southern California is appealed the ruling.

The Current Court Ruling

On Jan. 18, 2012 the State Appellate Court ruled that the trial court: 1) had authority to allocate future storage in the Central Basin; 2) had jurisdiction over water transfers between the Central and nearby West Coast Basins; and 3) was not prohibited from appointing a “watermaster” over unused space in the Central Basin. The court additionally ruled that the Central Basin Water District might also be able to serve as “watermaster.”

The defendants — the cities of Cerritos, Downey and Signal Hill — contended: 1) their costs would be increased if others were given the right to lease unused capacity in the Basin; 2) over-drafting of the Basin could result if new “wet water” was not put in first; and 3) there was a threat the appointed watermaster could try to merge the Central and West Coast Basins. The Central Basin did not want a proverbial “shotgun marriage” to result over the issue of renting a room to the unwanted bastard child of unused basin capacity.

Presumably, the above issues can be heard and adjudicated now that the jurisdictional issues have been clarified.

Enormous Implications

The timing of this case has enormous implications for what is happening statewide.  The Delta Stewardship Council appointed by the State Legislature is about to put into place widely encompassing laws that could usurp powers from local water districts.  Local water agencies would no longer be able to do anything that adversely impacted the Sacramento Delta.  The Delta is where Southern California gets most of its imported water supplies.  Conceivably, local water departments might not be able to issue any new water permits or “will serve” letters to real estate developers if that meant using more imported Delta water.

David O. Powell, the former chief engineer of the San Diego Office of the State Department of Water Resources and the Alameda Water District, said he believed the proposed Delta Plan would result in cutting water allocations to Southern California in half.

This is despite Southern California using about the same amount of water it used 25 years ago, even with 35 percent more population. Through conservation, Southern California has already given up about 1 million acre-feet of water per year to the Delta ecosystem. That is enough water for about 2 million households or 4.5 million people. Yet the Delta Stewardship Council wants to reduce water use by and additional 20 percent by the year 2020.

State and regional water agencies have shown an inability to bring more water to Southern California without huge, costly infrastructure projects, such as: the proposed Peripheral Canal that would route water around the Delta and/or the proposed $11.1 billion water bond.  Both of these projects would pinch the already deficit-plagued state budget.  There are matching fund requirements in the proposed state water bond.  Thus, the real cost of the proposed water bond may be about $18 billion.  The cost of the Peripheral Canal is estimated to cost $13 billion, or $23.5 billion with bond interest costs.

Consequently, local water districts and cities are going to have to find a way to capitalize on the unused storage capacity in the eight underground water basins in Southern California.  They may be compelled to contract for some of their own water supplies instead of depending on more imported water from regional water wholesalers.  This could mean water transfers from recycled water, from the new Cadiz water basin in the Southern California desert, voluntary purchases of water from farmers, desalinated ocean water or the development of new water resources. This will require a much more open water conveyance and storage system with reasonable transfer costs than the present semi-socialized system with many trade barriers.

So the outcome of the Water Replenishment District versus the city of Cerritos case may have huge consequences for Southern California’s cities and economy.

Economic Homicide? 

To add another subplot to the story, Assembly Bill 375 — the anti-urban sprawl bill passed in 2008 — would divert future population growth to the coastal urban areas.  But this may result in “no growth” if the water spigot from imported water from the Delta is simultaneously shut off.  This could kill off an economic recovery.

So maybe the above-mentioned court case is like the movie “Chinatown” and will involve murder — economic homicide — anyway.

Or it may have a wedding and happy ending: economic reproduction if local water agencies and city water departments are allowed to contract for future water and deposit it in fertile underground local water basins.

A sequel to “Chinatown” came out in 1990, called “Two Jakes.” It wasn’t as good, even though it starred Jack Nicholson and another great actor, Harvey Keitel.

It’s time for a better sequel. Call it, “Central Water Basin Blues.” Jack Nicholson could star once more, this time with Arnold Schwarzenegger, now an actor again after his stint as governor. As in the original “Chinatown,” and as with the real California, reality and fiction would blend on the celluloid.