In an era of constrained water resources, are the current institutional arrangements developed in the earlier era—a maze of member agencies and their balkanized, dependent retail agencies—adequate to the task of improving the resource management of water in California?
The governance of water and its history of development in California has been somewhat piecemeal. Other states that developed more slowly were able to put into place centralized water planning efforts, water courts, and often a state water engineer in charge of all water permits. California has a more balkanized system that was developed piecemeal over time. All in all, it’s worked quite well in Southern California, primarily because I think the emphasis was that this was a rapidly growing area, and we couldn’t grow without water. So our forefathers really sat down and worked out a plan. They divided up the groundwater basins through various adjudications to be handled by local managers, and then they collectively pooled their resources to develop a Metropolitan Water District to focus on imported water supply on a regional basis. Through that system, we’ve funded some of the best water movement infrastructure anywhere in the world. So that’s how you’ve seen us survive this current dro
