239 



LOS ANOELES TIMBS 



THURSDAY, JULY 27. 1995 



EDITORIALS 



of THE TIMES 



Let the Water Wars Cool Off 



In California, Mark Twain said 

 about a hundred years ago, whiskey is 

 for drinkln' and water is for fightln'. 

 For most of this state's recent history, 

 that Indeed has been the case, with 

 farmers fighting city folks and 

 Northern California fighting South- 

 ern California over what in this 

 largely arid state is a precious re- 

 source. 



In the last couple of years, however, 

 political Infighting has died down 

 thanks to a series of reasonable and 

 farsighted compromises, chief among 

 them a much -needed reform of how 

 the state's biggest man-made water 

 source operates. That source is the 

 Central valley Project, a series of 

 danu and canals built by the federal 

 government In the 1930s to bring 

 river water from the north to farms in 

 the sciuthem San Joaquin Valley. 



For almost two generations the 

 CVP sold heavily subsidized water to 

 large and sometimes inefficient farms, 

 even in times when California's cities 

 were struggling through drought. 



That finally began to change in 1992 

 when President George Bush signed a 

 law intended to bring a measure of 

 free -market economics to CVP oper- 

 ations. Among other things It allowed 

 farmers to sell their surplus water to 

 cities and set more realistic rules for 

 long-term water contracts, shorten- 

 ing them from 40 to 25 years and 

 requiring that they be reviewed after 

 they lapse rather than being renewed 

 automatically. 



Since that law went into effect, it 

 seems to have worked reasonably 

 well, although some technical fine- 

 tuning has been suggested. That, 

 unfortunately, is not good enough for 

 some agribusiness interests and San 

 Joaquin Valley water districts that 

 were never happy with the CVP 

 reform law in the first place. They 

 want the new Republican majority m 

 Congress to simply scrap the whole 

 reform law, and they have prodded a 

 number of Congress members from 

 the Central Valley, chiefly Rep. John 

 T. Doolittle (R-Rockland), to push 



legislation that d^ia just that. 

 Doollttle's blU, HR IMS.'ls now before 

 the House subcommittee on water 

 and power resources— where It 

 should die. 



The CVP reform law Is too new to 

 require any rewriting. It should be 

 monitored, to be sure, and where 

 necessary modified adnunistratively 

 by the federal government In consul- 

 tation with the affected parties. But 

 reopening the yeartJpngneOTtla- 

 tlona that resulted mine CVP uw Is 

 politically unwise. Thkt woifld lead to 

 the reopening of other political water 

 fights, not least among them the even 

 more complex compromise on water 

 quality In San Francisco Bay and the 

 Sacramento River Delta, the state's 

 biggest natural source of water. If 

 Doolittle and other shortsighted folks 

 in the Central Valleyjget their way, 

 the cynical wisdom Olwark Twain's 

 wit will be proved for another hun- 

 dred years. A populous and increas- 

 ingly urbanized CiUfdmia can't«fford 

 that 



