Water Resources

Re "Water District Policy Shift Could Help Developer," July 30. This article about Castaic Lake storm waters was an interesting exercise in a writer knowing what she wanted to write before she started doing the interviews. When asked by the reporter whether United Water Conservation District's request to the Department of Water Resources for an amendment to our storm water storage agreement was a shift of policy on the part of our board of directors, I clearly stated that it was not a policy shift.

After five years of talk, it's time for state and federal officials to make the tough decisions on the future of water resources in California. Every month that drags by without agreement brings the state closer to the inevitable drought that will slash supplies to farmers, businesses and families. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt will return to Sacramento Wednesday in an attempt to force the negotiations to a conclusion. Gov.

Gov. Gray Davis has appointed Tom Hannigan, a former Democratic assemblyman from Fairfield, as the new director of the the Department of Water Resources and as a member of the Fish and Game Commission. Davis also made two other key appointments. Rusty Areias, 49, a former Democratic assemblyman from Los Banos, was named director of Parks and Recreation, a post that pays $105,883 a year. Areias is now a member of the California Coastal Commission.

Re "Water: Back to the Table," editorial, Jan. 4: Stakeholders in the Cal-Fed process have spent the last four years in attempts to achieve a consensus on a plan to improve the ecological health of the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento Delta region, in addition to improving the water management and quality of the system. And success was at hand. Cal-Fed had developed a plan that by all reasonable analysis proved to be technically the best. However, issues of water conservation, new water storage and conveyance facilities were raised.

Growth along the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta could drive up the cost of drinking water while reducing its quality for residents from the East Bay to San Diego, some water officials say. State and local officials are trying to agree on how to save California's largest source of drinking water, which supplies 22 million people. The fight has focused on how to ensure that water supplies are divided fairly among farmers, cities and aquatic wildlife.

Last year, various prognosticators forecasted dire threats and destruction from El Nino-driven weather. Instead, Ventura County's waterways, wetlands, shoreline and other water resources have been under unremitting and relentless assault from unconscionable events perpetrated by local public agencies.

Saving the Salton Sea, as many have advocated, is a dubious project because it cannot be supported by science. The Salton Sea was created by an accidental break in an agricultural diversion canal of the Colorado River. The break allowed Colorado River water to flow into a sub-sea level depression in the Colorado Desert, thereby temporarily creating a fresh water lake.

This dusty desert land called Planet Ranch seems light years away from the trendy restaurants and upscale homes of Scottsdale, a posh, growing Phoenix suburb. And 180 miles away in far western Arizona, it might as well be. But this is Scottsdale property, and with it go the water rights to the 8,400-acre farm.

Begin with the adage about one man seeing the glass as half-full and another seeing it half-empty. That's a start--but only a start--toward understanding how San Diego County and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California can survey the same set of water facts and arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions.

The Colorado River is the most critically important source of fresh water in the Southwest. Three players--Imperial Valley's farmers, San Diego's water utility and the Metropolitan Water District--are jockeying for access to supply the growing water needs of the region. The MWD has long been a monopoly supplier of water to communities in the area, including San Diego.