California Is Getting Closer to a True Water Breakthrough

California’s every step toward its ranking as the wealthiest of the 50 states has depended on abundant water supplies.

That was true for the state’s rich past as rancher and farmer to the nation and the world. It must hold true to ensure a rich industrial and commercial future for the state in a competitive global economy.

This is precisely the point of a battle that is shaping up in the House of Representatives over forcing old water habits to give way to new. It is a battle both farms and cities can win, a contest that must have no losers.

But in trying to head off change, farmers and irrigation districts have cast themselves as martyrs to rampant economic growth and a new environmental awareness that fish, wildlife, parks and even rivers need water to survive, just as do crops.

THE MYTH OF MARTYRDOM: However, martyrs would be created only in myth under a bill by Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), legislation that has become the focus of the struggle between past and future. What it would do is relax agriculture’s iron grip on the biggest single block of California water so that it can be used where society thinks it can best breed prosperity.

It would do that through two changes in the law that created the federal system that pumps 8 million acre-feet of water each year into the San Joaquin Valley, most of it to irrigate farms.

Under existing law, water from the Central Valley Project can be bought or sold only inside the valley and only under rules that discourage a free market in water. Thus the law gives valley farmers first call on supplies even if urban areas run short of the water that is used to produce all but a small fraction of the state’s income.

FISH VS. PEOPLE: Miller’s bill would reserve 1.5 million acre-feet of water for rivers and streams and the fish and wildlife that depend on them.

This is essential because the insatiable demand for irrigation water threatens to turn the rich Sacramento Delta to desert. Salmon, steelhead trout and other fish that return from the sea through the Sacramento Delta to spawn in the cold waters of north central California are in danger of disappearing entirely.

In organized marches on Sacramento, farmers have painted a “people against fish” conflict. But the real issue hangs simply on leaving some water behind instead of pumping nearly all of it into irrigation ditches.

HIGH AND DRY? Are the fears of farmers that they will be left high and dry by changes in water laws warranted? Not by any means.

The Bank of America is the state’s largest commercial lender to agriculture. It is very unlikely that the bank would endorse anything that might jeopardize its farming loans.

Yet it strongly supports the maximum possible freedom under the law for farmers to sell Central Valley Project surplus water to cities or other farmers anywhere in the state.

If the law is reformed, would cities swill down so much water that agriculture would die as an industry? One witness in a hearing last week by the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, which Rep. Miller chairs, said no. He is Carl Boronkay, general manager of Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District, which distributes more than 2 million acre-feet of water to 15 million people each year.

When Boronkay was asked how much water he would buy from Central Valley Project farmers to prevent shortages, he said it would take only about 100,000 additional acre-feet a year from all sources, including the project system, to meet the MWD’s requirements.

A team of San Francisco Bay Area analysts estimates that cities would buy only relatively trivial amounts of irrigation water to meet their needs. Another study calculates that a generation from now, urban areas would have need of 10% of the water now used in agriculture. That amount probably can be freed up just by taking polluted and marginal farmland out of production.

WATER MARKETING: California is the largest manufacturing state in the nation, 70% larger than its nearest rival, New York, Boronkay told the committee. A free market in water, he said, is “an economic imperative” for California. That will be the case at least for the decades it will take to develop new facilities to trap more of the fresh water that now flows to sea during rainy seasons.

Continuing the federal subsidies without offering an opportunity to put project water to more efficient use inevitably will mean using water to irrigate some crops because the water is cheap, not because the crops are in great demand. That is classic waste.

The Miller bill envisions a generally free market in which prices of water would respond to supply and demand, as with other commodities.

An alternative formula sponsored by Sen. John Seymour (R-Calif.) would allow farmers to sell their water only if irrigation districts approved and under conditions set by the Interior Department in Washington. That is a market about as free as the system that caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

BUSINESS WEIGHS IN: Because dependable water supplies are crucial to commerce and industry as well as agriculture, business has lately taken a more active interest in the struggle over California’s water future.

The California Business Roundtable, for example, has told Congress that “all water rights should be made as freely transferable as possible, on a voluntary basis.” In a letter to Seymour, James R. Harvey, chairman of the San Francisco-based Transamerica Corp., urged him to change his bill to reflect such a policy and to ensure that “the legitimate concerns of the environmental community are addressed.”

Both sides in the water battle insist that negotiations are producing give-and-take and, they say, reform remains within reach. If California is to have a future as golden as its past, achieving that reform is the only way this battle can turn out.