The Eternal Dustbowl

Paying for the sins of L.A.�s water barons has created a half-billion-dollar boondoggle

Comments (0) By Jeffrey Anderson Wednesday, Mar 22 2006

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Such tainted history will be difficult to overcome, he says. Emotions drove the last settlement.“DWP loses and Great Basin wins anytime you factor in public sympathy. But there’s a symbiosis. Maybe it’s a codependency. They’re at odds with each other, yet they need each other. They both live with a shared history and they both take advantage of it. At some point water scarcity and money will rear their heads.”

Greg James is the former Inyo County counsel and former Inyo water director. A native of Los Angeles, he moved to Bishop in 1977 to get involved in the water battles that preceded the dust settlement. James is a neighbor of Ellen Hardebeck’s. He lives in the shadows of the Sierra in a ranch-style house bordered by a ditch flowing with fresh water out of Bishop Creek. “As long as the water comes out of the tap in Los Angeles and it doesn’t cost too much, people don’t care what happens up here,” he says. “It’s hard to get a DWP commissioner up here, much less a councilman or a mayor.”

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James sees a broader problem with the DWP’s approach to dust control: Various mitigation projects in Owens Valley have forced Los Angeles to leave an astounding amount of water behind. A 2004 environmental-impact report shows the DWP losing 185,000 acre-feet per year of tasty Owens Valley water for the dust project, the refilling of Mono Lake, the restoration of the Lower Owens River and a prohibition against groundwater pumping pursuant to a historic settlement with Inyo County. That’s more than half the annual total from the aqueduct, projected to average 321,000 acre-feet per year through 2020. Meanwhile Los Angeles increasingly relies on Colorado River water purchased from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. “Same as they drink in San Diego,” James says. “You can taste the difference.”

“Great Basin had ideas but DWP wasn’t interested,” James says ruefully. “But irrigation does produce a habitat for wading birds and shorebirds,” he adds, pointing to Great Basin’s — and Hardebeck’s — emphasis on the return of the snowy plover, for which entire portions of the environmental contract with CH2M Hill are dedicated. “And if there is no settlement then Great Basin is in litigation forever.” James is asked, isn’t that a possibility again with the looming battle over Great Basin’s demand for nine more miles of dust mitigation? “I’m still wondering about that. Why now?”

In retrospect, James says, environmental justice and a sense of reason could have prevailed if Great Basin and the DWP weren’t entrenched in a blood feud. A more elegant solution could have been found. “Instead of solving the problem, DWP tried to make it go away by throwing muscle and legal talent at Great Basin. So they were forced to swallow a bitter pill. Now my darkest fear is that they let the project go gangbusters and that someday, someone, be it the City Council, the mayor, a commissioner, whoever, will step in and say, ‘This is just too much.’”