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Star Agricultural Economics Section - Page A4 Star

November 20, 1996

WATER DISTRICT SELLS WEST SIDE'S DRINKING WATER TO LOS ANGELES!

by Staff Journalists, The Daily Republican Newspaper

FRESNO DESK - The San Joaquin rural town of Mendota has a polluted water supply. Resident of this West Side farming community have resorted to buying bottled water for cooking and washing.

It is ironic, then, that a local water district fed by the San Joaquin River has excess water it can't wait to get rid of.

The water company won't divert the needed water to Mendota.Instead, the water district decided to send it all to Los Angeles. The price tag to Los Angeles is $22 million over 25 years.

The news that mendota's drinking water was being diverted and sent to Los Angeles by the local water company has outraged Mendota residents.'I didn't think there was any surplus water coming down the San Joaquin,' says an angry Edward Petry, a former Mendota city councilman.

Petry and his mendota neighbors have just found out they don't have an recourse. California water policy permitted the local water company to sell its water to Los Angeles, even though Mendota is dying of thirst. It's called water marketing or water transfers. Such diversions have the consequence of releasing the San Joaquin Valley's most precious natural resource into a winner-take-all market.

The federal law making this possible was passed in the 1992 Democrat Party controlled Congress. That law removed many of the obstacles to transferring water out of the Central Valley Project(CVP). The CVP is a massive federal water-delivery system that dries up 98% of the San Joaquin River's flow at Friant Dam and diverts it to some three dozen local water districts.

The first major deal under the law, which has thirsty Mendotan's outraged, would take water from the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District near Bakersfield and send it to Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District.

The water-transfer still requires approval from the Clinton administration's, Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the Central Valley Project. It also needs a go-ahead from the state Water Resources Control Board, which has jurisdiction over all water rights and movement in California.

The agrement for water transfers goes like this: With a limited amount of money and a limited and unpredictable supply of water, Californians would be better off economically and environmentally if water was sold at whatever price the market will bear. Selling water is preferable to spending money to build new, multi billion dollar dam-and-reservoir systems, massive canals or other storage facilities.

Critics argue that state law requires the Water Board to maintain minimal water flows in the San Joaquin River to restore its health and recreational value.

The Wall Street Journal reported the breaking story on Wednesday.The Journal quoted an environmentalist in Fresno as saying: 'The Water Board is in charge of a publicly owned resource, and they cannot give away the whole store,' says Lloyd Carter, the president of the California Save Our Streams Council.

The Carter group is supporting a complaint before the state Water Board that would force the federal government to make more water available in the river for fish and wildlife.

What's more, transfer opponents contend that the state has a moral obligation to send water to hard-pressed communities such as Mendota - and they play up the notion of water leaving their region and going south to sprinkle movie stars' front lawns and fill their swimming pools.

For Mendota as a whole, 'you're talking about $2,800 a day that is being spent on bottled water that people really can't afford,' says Petry.

To that, officials of the Arcing-Edison water district say: Fine. You can have our water. You just have to pay for it. 'To make the benefits happen, that's what it takes,' says Steve Collude, the district's engineer-manager. 'It takes financing.'

Collude stressed that the Arcing-Edison district will put Metropolitan's money back into the land: It will buy 500 acres to develop an expansive water-banking operation with sandy percolation ponds and 15 wells. In wet years, the district will pool water in the ponds, allowing it to seep down into underground storage; in dry years, the district will pump the water up for its own use or that of Metropolitan's.

In fighting the environmentalists' efforts to secure more water for the river's fish and wildlife, the bureau has claimed that such a move would result in an annual agricultural loss of more than $400 million in crops.

Many believe that it's only a matter of time before a major transfer successfully goes through even as peple may be dieng of water dehydration on the West Side.

'Water transfers are here to stay,'says Rusty Areias, a former state assemblyman whose family dairy farm watched its earlier deal with the Metropolitan Water District fall to pieces.

Its inevitable with the current political and economic realities at play in California as it moves with hesitation toward the year 2000.


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