Sat Dec 23 18:27:34 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (December 2006)
Steven P. Erie, _Beyond Chinatown: The Metropolitan Water District,
Growth, and the Environment in Southern California_. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006. xvii + 364 pp. $22 (paperback),
ISBN: 0-8047-5139-0.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Gary D. Libecap, Bren School of Environmental
Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Steven Erie, of the Department of Political Science at UC-San Diego,
is the foremost authority on the Metropolitan Water District (MWD)
and water politics in Southern California. And water is everything in
Southern California. It is a region blessed with a benevolent
climate, good soil, arable land, and magnificent harbors, but cheated
by nature with too little water. Annual precipitation ranges from 10
to 15 inches. To support Southern California's booming cities,
burgeoning local economies, and bountiful agricultural production
water had to be brought from elsewhere -- the Colorado, Sacramento,
and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries, as well as from Owens
Valley, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just east of Mount Whitney.
As the region's giant water wholesaler and policy maker, providing
water for twenty-six cities and water districts representing eighteen
million people in six counties, the Metropolitan Water District has
played a direct role in bringing and distributing water to Southern
California. Water markets historically have been limited, in part due
to the lack of clearly specified property rights to water which would
underlie voluntary exchanges, and there have been many competing
claims for scarce water. Bringing the water to San Diego and the Los
Angeles Basin also has required the construction of elaborate
infrastructure investment in canals, pumping stations, and
reservoirs. For all of these reasons, most delivery and allocation
has involved politics and bureaucratic decision-making, making water
the most political of resources.
Erie's new book is an important addition to the literature on western
water. There are three parts and eight chapters in the book. Part I,
with Chapters One through Three, addresses the historical development
of the Metropolitan Water District and its efforts to bring water to
Southern California. Part II, with Chapters Four through Six,
addresses recent contemporary problems facing the regional agency --
opposition to the delivery of additional water from the Colorado
River and Northern California to Southern California from
environmental groups, as well as from expanding agricultural and
urban areas in Arizona, Nevada, and the Bay Area, and the rise of
water markets that provides opportunities to secure more water and,
at the same time, threatens to undermine the authority and structure
of the MWD. Part III, with Chapters Seven and Eight, summarizes the
rise of other problems and the efforts of the utility to respond to
them. This book represents a major scholarly endeavor, with extensive
endnotes, tables, and figures.
In Parts I and II of the book, Erie describes the formation of the
MWD in 1928 to coordinate access and delivery of Colorado River water
to Los Angeles and ten other cities via the 242-mile Colorado River
Aqueduct. In the 1970s the regional cooperative also imported water
from Northern California via the State Water Project and the
California Aqueduct. It now supplies 60 percent of the water for Los
Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, and San Diego
Counties. Erie traces the historical development of the MWD as it
replaced the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power as the
region's chief water organization. He describes the political and
bureaucratic pressures placed on the agency, which have molded its
behavior. While it is an extremely powerful organization, the MWD is
subject to internal conflicts among member water agencies reflecting
the sometimes competing demands of San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange
County, among others. It also is affected by changing external
political conditions elsewhere in California and the West, including
the Supreme Court's ruling in _Arizona v. California_ that reduced
the amount of Colorado River water available to California, the
Endangered Species Act which requires more water be left in the San
Francisco Bay Delta rather than being shipped to Southern California,
as well as overall resistance to water transfers from rural areas to
urban ones. Erie describes how the MWD addresses these conflicting
demands as it has responded to its mandate for providing water to
Southern California's urban regions. An especially useful part of the
book is his description of the long and contentious negotiations
between the MWD and the Imperial Irrigation District Board (IID) for
the transfer of agricultural water to San Diego. The IID uses about
80 percent of California's allocation of Colorado River water, which
is about 75 percent of the total water available to all lower basin
states. Erie describes the underlying political pressures and
institutional objectives that made the bargaining between the MWD and
the IID Board so difficult. Understanding these factors will help
make future water trades less controversial and perhaps quicker.
Certainly, more water will have to be re-allocated from IID and other
similar organizations as Southern California's urban areas expand.
Erie also points out that these water exchanges are complicated by
climate change that adds uncertainty to any long-term arrangement
regarding water.
The final chapter in Part II, Chapter 6, discusses how the MWD is
responding to the rise of water markets and the opportunities
afforded it to lease water or purchase water rights from irrigators
in California's vast Central Valley and along the Colorado River.
Many of these purchases have been highly controversial, especially
among those who oppose the flow of water from rural areas to support
greater urbanization and population growth in Southern California.
Part III summarizes the current demands and dilemmas facing the
agency. It has a mandate to provide water to a growing population in
a semi-arid region at a time of increasing scarcity and competing
uses. Indeed, as Erie points out, there is a fine balancing of water
demand and supply that could unravel if climate change brings more
serious drought. In the face of this, the MWD is moving forward
ambitiously to secure additional water sources for, as Erie
describes, a growing "desert civilization."
_Beyond Chinatown_ is a valuable blend of economic history, policy
analysis, and political science about a huge governmental institution
charged with bringing water to the part of the country that best
typifies the American economy and society in the latter half of the
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- Los Angeles and
Southern California.
Gary D. Libecap, of the Bren School of Environmental Science and
Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, is working on
the extent and development of water markets in the American West and
the role of legal and regulatory factors in molding water markets. He
also is exploring the transaction cost advantages of the rectangular
survey of land, put into place by the Land Ordinance of 1785,
relative to the previous use of metes and bounds in demarcating
property boundaries. Similar property bounding issues arise in
contemporary economic development policies.
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