By Ellen Stern Harris

[Mrs. Harris is a Director Emeritus of the MWD and was formerly a member of the L.A. Regional Water Quality Control Board]

Seventeen million Southern Californians, including those in Beverly Hills, rely on the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California for their water supply. The MWD’s mission is to provide water for all comers, no matter how many, or the traffic and air quality consequences. It has become the de facto land use planner for California. Where the water goes, there goes development.

MWD has been, and is, entering into contracts to obtain additional water supplies by the fallowing of agricultural land, thus making us ever more reliant on imported produce. It is doing nothing to urge that inappropriate, water-intensive crops such as rice, alfalfa and heavily subsidized cotton no longer be grown in California.

While water-short economies, such as Israel, are stringent in agricultural water conservation enforcement, California allows agriculture to use 85% of its water without any water conservation requirements.

Residential customers, who use only 5% of the State’s water, are unfairly required to do 100% of the water conserving.

Too, MWD is pushing for more desalination plants which will usurp valuable scenic and recreational sites along the coast, a major tourism draw. Tourism has traditionally been our #2 industry. Desal plants also degrade offshore waters and diminish fish stocks and other marine biota.

MWD is pushing for ever more recycled sewage treatment facilities. This, despite adverse health consequences of consuming such inadequately treated and inadequately monitored effluent.

All of these efforts are to help developers obtain a required 20-year assured supply of water, before they can commence construction of major developments.

Until the construction of L.A. DWP’s Owens Valley Aqueduct (portrayed in the movie “Chinatown”) and later, MWD’s Colorado River Aqueduct, followed by the building of the State’s California Aqueduct, bringing us water through the Delta in Northern California -- Southern California was a desert.

Water quality is another major issue, as a quarter of the wells in the San Gabriel Valley and in parts of the San Fernando Valley have been shut down, due to contamination by industrial solvents. The amount of water taken from the Owens Valley has been sharply curtailed by the courts. That’s because of the adverse environmental effects there, including creating a dust bowl in what had been Owens Lake.

The water from the Colorado River is exceedingly high in total dissolved solids (TDS or salt content) which has adverse health effects. The water from the Ca. State Aqueduct, flows over serpentine rock which contains asbestos. It also picks up agricultural chemicals from the Delta.

Besides, drinking, our uses of such waters include bathing (the skin absorbs whatever is in the water), washing dishes and clothes, flushing our toilets and watering our trees, lawns and gardens. Keeping such shade, shadow and greenery alive, reduces our reliance on electricity for air conditioning.

Water is also essential for fighting fires. The Santa Monica Mountains chaparral (scrub brush) requires fire, as part of its ecology, in order for seed pods to explode and propagate ever more chaparral. This, in turn, creates the dry brush build-up which has brought us the great Malibu and Bel Air fires, as well as major fires in other urban canyons.

Fire can not be suppressed, without adequate water supplies, electrical power for pumping it and trained fire suppression personnel. This means that those of us in “the flats,” at the foothills and below, are also subject to our homes being destroyed in a fire.

In fact, when the Shah of Iran was deposed, UCLA students of Persian ancestry drove and marched a mile above Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills, to reach the home of the Shah’s sister. There, they overturned a sheriff’s squad car and set fire to the ivy surrounding the Shah’s sister’s home. The ashes landed on roofs and patios at least two miles downwind.

While the State’s #1 industry, agriculture, uses 85% of the State’s water, it has no legal requirement to conserve water. Instead, MWD demands that the residential sector do 100% of the conserving. One additional concern: Privatization of water supplies is becoming an ever-greater threat.

Not long ago, riots took place in Columbia, when Bechtel took over its water supply and greatly increased rates. European companies are reaching into communities throughout the U.S, including California, trying to sell cities on turning over their water systems to them. This has been very tempting, as municipal finances have become ever- more difficult.

The State Legislature created MWD in 1928. Extending from Ventura County to the Mexican border, MWD is made up of 14 cities, 11 municipal water districts and the San Diego County Water Authority. It had 52 members of its board of directors until recently, when the Legislature cut it back to 37 directors.

Directors’ votes are not cast according to one person, one vote. Instead, it is according to the assessed valuation of the land within the agency being represented. Some board members are elected officials and others are appointed.

It may be time for the Legislature to consider what might be a more appropriate structure than MWD to manage so much of our State’s ever more precious water supplies. Especially now, as the West’s greatest drought in 500 years is being predicted.

Ellen Stern Harris
Executive Director,
Fund for The Environment 
Editor of www.BeverlyHillsCitizen.org
P.O. Box 228 / Beverly Hills, CA 90213