The Drought--at Least It’s Got Us Thinking : Regionalism, desalination, population control on the table

It shouldn’t have taken a record-breaking drought to force California to take a searching look at the way it lives and what lies ahead for the nation’s most populous state. But at least that soul-searching is beginning to take place, and state leaders should let nothing distract them from thinking about the future.

For example:

--Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown Jr. (D-San Francisco) is back with his proposal for regional governments to manage the growth that adds 2,000 new people to the state every day. He wants a law that would create elected bodies to deal with water supply, smog, transportation and planning. Gov. Pete Wilson is concerned that this is moving too fast, but Brown rightly says the drought is cause enough for urgency.

--Engineers are taking second looks at the technology for taking the salt out of seawater to give at least some Californians a water supply they could count on in dry years. Desalination has supplied fresh water for millions of people in the Middle East and elsewhere for many years. Now the drought, coupled with the incredible costs of--and environmental problems with--new dams and aqueducts, make such plants seem suddenly more attractive for California, even at premium prices.

--Wilson has a Growth Management Council at work, and his resources secretary, David Wheeler, said in Washington this week: “We’re very close to the point where we’ll have to ask about population growth and development to bring water supply into balance with demand.”

--The city of Los Angeles has formally joined other parts of Southern California in limiting residential and industrial water use, with stiff penalties for ignoring the limits.

--Agriculture’s big share of water from the Sacramento River delta, scarcely mentioned in years between droughts, continues to come under fire. Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), acting chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, said Tuesday, “We need to question whether we can afford to make water available at highly subsidized prices to grow low-value crops on marginal land.”

Now that Californians--from corporate executives to farm workers--have discovered during the drought that a prosperous future will not just fall into their laps, they can’t afford to quit asking those kinds of questions.

As Times writer Maura Dolan reported recently, nobody can tell when the current drought will end because scientists don’t always know what causes such dry spells.

Rationing will help get Southern California through the rest of this fifth year of drought, perhaps even a sixth year if that is what’s in store for the state. Even if the governor’s estimate that households may have to be limited to half their normal consumption holds true, Los Angeles would be better off than Marin County, where the per capita ration is already down to 50 gallons a day.

Daunting statistics like that have caused a flurry of activity in desalination. Santa Barbara expects a plant to start producing a third of its water by summer, 1992. The Metropolitan Water District will build a pilot plant and then a full-scale desalination facility in the San Diego area in a few years.

As Times science writer Thomas H. Maugh II reported recently, water from the Santa Barbara plant will cost $1,900 an acre-foot but add only about $20 a month to water bills.

The MWD thinks it can produce fresh water for $500 an acre-foot, slightly more than twice the cost of water imported from the Colorado River and the Sacramento delta.

Environmental issues need to be thoroughly thrashed out before the state starts lining its coast with water factories. Ironically, if desalination works, the most serious problem might be that leaders would once more take their eyes off the future. But that’s a chance most Californians would be happy to take.