Taking Back Mulholland’s Water

No one goes there anymore. But when you drive north on the Golden State Freeway through the San Fernando Valley, you catch a glimpse of it through the window: a hillside with a silver stream of water cascading prettily down a concrete chute.

You ever wondered about that chute? It happens to be the terminus of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the infamous aqueduct built by William Mulholland that drained the Owens Valley dry so Los Angeles might grow into a mighty city.

It was there, on the hillside, that Mulholland himself opened the aqueduct in 1913 and uttered the most famous speech in Los Angeles history. As the waters came tumbling down, Mulholland stood before a throng of 40,000 cheering citizens and said:

“There it is. Take it.”

I tell this story to lend a soulful note to the ugly war that is developing over Valley secession. Last month, Los Angeles threatened to take away the Valley’s rights to this very water should it break away from the city.

In an article in The Times, City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter was quoted as saying: “I’m sure [the secessionists] will be horrified to learn that they may be able to take the land, but to take the water, they’ll need to come back to us.”

Another unnamed official of Los Angeles said this: “We went out and got that water. The Valley exists because we got it. Now if the Valley wants to go, and if it can get the votes, OK. But it’s still our water, and it’s going to stay that way.”

In other words, the city is now saying, “There it is. Give it up.”

Can it be that we are headed toward another water war like the one that raged in the Owens Valley? You can picture the pitiful scenes:

* Valley citizens, armed with shovels, march to Los Angeles’ reservoirs and try to dig diversion ditches so their neighborhoods will not return to tumbleweed. Ragged children pathetically try to dip their cups for a drink.

* Los Angeles orders a police cordon along the L.A. River after wealthy matrons from Sherman Oaks organize bucket brigades and start stealing water in the night.

* Summer evenings are punctuated by the thump, thump of dynamite as guerrilla squads from Van Nuys set off their charges underneath the aqueduct. Los Angeles calls for the National Guard.

* A young father in Valley Village is caught digging a well in his backyard and put on show trial. Los Angeles prosecutors claim it’s his third digging offense and call for hard time at Folsom.

Anyway, you get the idea. The fact is, none of this will happen. The Valley will never be deprived of its water. Nor will the threat of such deprivation scuttle the secessionist movement.

That’s because Los Angeles’ threats are hollow. City officials know they cannot take Mulholland’s water away from the Valley. Their strategy appears to be one of bluster. Like the schoolyard bully, they are praying their bluff is not called.

For example, here is the opinion of David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power:

“We have an obligation to continue to supply water to everyone that we currently serve. If you turn on your faucet and DWP water comes out now, it will come out in the future,” he says.

“The idea that people will be cut off from their water is not a question on the table.”

Freeman’s statement grows out of political and legal realities. From a political standpoint, the idea of abandoning the Valley is inconceivable. The state of California would not tolerate it.

From a legal standpoint, the DWP’s own counsel concedes that the city could be forced by the courts to continue supplying water if it tried to stop.

“Should the San Fernando Valley secede from the city of Los Angeles, those customers currently receiving their water from the Department of Water and Power are legally entitled to expect continued service,” he recently wrote in an opinion for the mayor’s office.

In fact, the worst-case scenario for the Valley would involve the same water coming to the Valley but at a higher price. Both Freeman and his counsel, David Hotchkiss, believe that Los Angeles would be justified in charging a break-off city higher rates than it charges its own citizens.

“Los Angeles owns the water, so I believe we could charge them a fair market price rather than the lower price we charge our own customers,” Freeman says.

But the Valley may well escape even this scenario. That’s because no one knows whether Freeman is right when he says Los Angeles “owns the water.”

The fact is, the courts have never sorted out a situation like this one. It resembles a divorce. The Valley has been part of Los Angeles for more than 80 years and, like a loyal wife now leaving the marriage, it may have accrued rights to all kinds of property, including water.

“This case is proceeding into uncharted territory,” says Antonio Rossmann, one of California’s most experienced water litigators. “If the Valley leaves, almost certainly the issue would head for the courts. You could have a variety of outcomes.”

Some of those outcomes are intriguing. For example: Los Angeles built the aqueduct before the Valley joined the city. So let’s say those water rights belong exclusively to the city.

But in the following years, the city expanded its rights to include diversions from Mono Lake and pumping from underground sources in the Owens Valley. Did the Valley acquire part of those rights since its residents helped pay the freight?

We shall see. We may be watching one of those political contests in which legal justice also delivers dramatic justice. It would be sweet to watch.

Here’s what I mean: Los Angeles put the terminus of the aqueduct in the Valley for a reason. It needed the then-farmers of the Valley to buy the excess water delivered by the aqueduct. Otherwise the city could not have paid off the $25 million in bonds that had been spent on construction.

As the Los Angeles Times observed in 1913, the city could use only one-tenth of the water delivered by the aqueduct. “The remainder is to be sold for purposes of irrigation to districts contiguous to this city and favorably located for annexation.”

Righto. Two years later the Valley was annexed. And gradually, with plenty of water available, it was carved into ranchettes until it arrived at its current state of urban nightmare. The fortunes made from the carving up mostly went over the hill to the “real” Los Angeles.

So there are old debts here. Baggage. The story of Los Angeles and the Valley and the aqueduct is neither clean nor pretty. Largely, in this story, the Valley has played the role of rube and victim.

And now we have a new chapter. We don’t know how it will play out, but I, for one, am ready for a little role reversal.