LONE PINE, Calif. — Fed up with a series of delays, the state attorney general's office on Thursday filed a lawsuit to force the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to restore water to the Owens River, as required under a 6-year-old agreement to stop environmental damage to the surrounding countryside caused by the city's groundwater pumping.
"This project will provide long-needed restoration of habitats, wildlife and recreation in the Owens Valley," Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said. "It's what the community wants. It's what the city promised. We're asking the court to make sure it happens."
For Owens Valley residents, the delay in reviving the river, which was reduced to a dry channel in 1913 to slake the thirst of the growing metropolis of Los Angeles, amounts to a dereliction of duty.
Owens River -- A photo caption in Friday's California section stated that Los Angeles Department of Water and Power resource managers Brian Tillemans and Clarence Martin were standing in the dry Owens River bed. They were standing on the floor of the Owens Valley in the area known as Black Rock, south of Bishop.
Residents point out at that each year of delay saves the DWP million of dollars in implementation costs.
To hear Los Angeles water officials tell it, their efforts to make good on a promise to put water back into a 61-mile stretch of the Lower Owens River have been bedeviled by regulatory paperwork and nit-picking.
Back in 1997, the DWP agreed to restore water flow by mid-2003. Then it pushed the deadline back to 2004. Now, the department says it can't happen until late 2005 or later.
The delays have stoked the animosities that have simmered in the valley for most of the past century, ever since the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which dried up Owens Lake and helped turn the valley into a dust bowl.
"DWP officials are masters of delay," said environmental activist Mike Prather, an Owens Valley resident of 23 years, as he strode across a concrete, steel and wooden barrier separating the riverbed from an aqueduct brimming with water destined for Los Angeles.
"There appears to be no one in the DWP who sincerely supports the plan enough to move it along," Prather said. "To them, it's just a nuisance. To us, that's pathetic."
DWP officials insist they are doing the best they can, given the vastness of the task of completing environmental documents required before restoration can get underway, and disputes with Inyo County officials nearly every step of the way.
That time-consuming work, however, has been assigned to two full-time DWP staffers, department officials said. It includes analyses of the impact of restoring water flows on everything from plants and animals that have settled into the channel since the river went dry to dead plants that might raise a stench when they become sodden and start to rot.
