Water is for Fighting Over by John Fleck

Author:John Fleck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

The Laguna Declaration

Southern California was not always so thrifty. Like every major metro area depending on the Colorado River, it was built on imported water that was moved out of the river corridor to adjoining land that would otherwise have been dry. Albuquerque, Denver, Cheyenne, and Salt Lake City literally move the water physically out of the basin. Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson are technically in the Colorado River Basin, but they have to pump the river’s water back uphill to use it. Initially, like the others, Southern California cities overreached their groundwater and built increasingly long pipelines and aqueducts to augment supplies. This began with the Los Angeles Aqueduct to the Owens Valley, completed in 1913, followed by the Colorado River Aqueduct, which delivered its first water in 1939, and the State Water Project, which moved Northern California water to the Southland over the Tehachapi Mountains beginning in the early 1970s.

The political geographies of modern American cities are complex things. Los Angeles city government built the Owens Valley aqueduct, but the city limits encompassed only a fraction of the region’s population. To gain access to its water, communities had to give up their sovereignty and annex into LA. Preexisting cities like Pasadena had no intention of doing that, so in 1928 they banded together and formed the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a regional water agency that would build the aqueduct to bring water from the Colorado River, spreading the water beyond the boundaries of a single municipality to an entire region. As the federal government was preparing for the construction of Hoover Dam, Southern California was preparing the governance structures needed to build the plumbing and use the water.

But the creation of Met, initially encompassing Los Angeles and twelve suburban neighbors, simply raised a different version of the same question: what if neighboring communities wanted to join in the project and share in the water? The boundaries of who was in and who was out were still an issue. The initial Colorado River supply was far more than needed by Met’s thirteen charter members, leaving enough water for more communities to join the club. But who, and how many? In 1938, Met’s Water Problems Committee drew a line: the ultimate capacity of the Colorado River Aqueduct would set the limit, and decisions about annexation and extension of supply would depend on there being an adequate supply of water.4 Water scarcity would define the boundaries of how big Southern California’s cities could grow.

Met governance has always been politically complicated. The largest and most powerful municipal water agency in the United States, Met functions as a water wholesaler, with a governing board made up of representatives of each of the municipal member agencies that pass Met water along to homes and businesses. Its decisions influenced critical growth policy as Southern California navigated its transition from an agricultural empire to a megacity.

For many of the people operating at those boundaries between water supply and urban growth, the old 1930s thinking about limits simply would not do.

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