Water Rights

LONE PINE, Calif. -- In an arid Eastern Sierra region where people have had a keen appreciation for water since Los Angeles raided their supplies nearly a century ago, a new water war is brewing. But this time the combatants are locals: A hunting club is battling a geothermal plant for control of an aquifer beneath the southern Owens Valley's lava flows and desert scrub.

Those property owners (circa 1907-1914) who forced the city to purchase their land and water rights in the Owens Valley are as much if not more to blame for the condition in the Owens Valley as are Los Angeles or the Department of Water and Power. Though the DWP and the city of Los Angeles are neither perfect nor blameless with respect to the current conditions in the Owens Valley, your Nov. 12 editorial ("Glimpse of a Rainbow") completely ignores the historical context of water export from the Owens Valley.

To everything there is a season; but water is eternal. Or it was, until we started disturbing its natural rhythms. We penned it behind dams and diverted it to aqueducts, starving the life out of rivers and creating an unsupportable addiction to using more water than we need to live. Despite the looming crisis in water, we have enough to live on, but not enough to waste.

It's an audacious -- some say absurd -- scheme: Take Colorado River water just before it slips over the Utah border, pump it east more than 200 miles, lift it 5,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains and deliver it to the state's burgeoning Front Range communities. Nicknamed the "Big Straw," it is a big, old-fashioned kind of idea, reminiscent of the mega-water projects that greened the West in the 20th century. Estimates of its cost start at $2.5 billion and climb.

A federal judge Wednesday rejected the major arguments of Klamath Basin farmers who sought $1 billion from the federal government after regulators virtually cut off irrigation water during a drought to protect endangered fish. Environmentalists and fishermen who have been battling farmers over water in the sprawling agricultural basin on the California-Oregon border called the decision by Judge Francis M. Allegra of the U.S. Court of Claims a major victory.

"Somewhere far away from us, people have no understanding that their demand for cheap electricity, air conditioning and lights 24 hours a day have contributed to the imbalance of this very delicate place." -- Nicole Horseherder, Navajo, Black Mesa * For years upon years beneath star-heavy skies, the Navajo awakened before the sun rose over northeastern Arizona's Black Mesa to guide their sheep to the natural waters of desert washes and springs to beat the overwhelming heat of day.

There is no more politically explosive issue in California than water, so we understand why it has taken a while for the Legislature to come up with a deal on how to fairly conserve, distribute and store it. But enough already. Legislative leaders have, according to insiders, resolved the most important issues on a series of bills to repair the state's crumbling water infrastructure, preserve ecosystems in the ailing Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, mandate a 20% cut in per capita usage by 2020, create new storage facilities, monitor groundwater supplies and develop new penalties and enforcement mechanisms on illegal diversion.

When it starts at 10,000 feet and slices through the mountains in the canyon that bears its name, the Cache la Poudre River is a shock of water in this dry land. But by the time it winds its way out to this laid-back college city of 120,000 people, most of its water has been grabbed by farmers and other cities that control the maze of canals and diversion dams that turn the river into a trickle.

With relatively minor improvements, the Freeman Diversion Improvement Project on the Santa Clara River could have saved almost 60% more water last month than it did, water district officials said this week. But concerns raised by public agencies, sport fishermen and environmentalists during the design and public hearing phases of the Freeman Diversion Dam pressured the United Water Conservation District to limit the capacity of the $31-million project, engineers said.

The city of Los Angeles needs to reduce its diversion of water from the Mono Lake basin by up to 75% in order to preserve the lake's delicate and unusual ecosystem, the U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday as it unveiled a draft management plan in Los Angeles. Although the Forest Service cannot legally compel the city to cut back its water consumption, the Mono Basin National Forest Scenic Area management plan was applauded by a spokeswoman for the Mono Lake Committee.