A Call For A Set Of Ahwahnee Principles For Water

Taken from a speech by Martha Davis

Introduction

Thank you for inviting me back to speak to the Local Government Commission’s Yosemite Conference. Last year was the first time I attended the conference. I thought it was extraordinary then, and even more extraordinary now.

The last two days got me to thinking (which I guess is the point) about the question of water resource planning. If we had held this conference ten years ago, what would we have talked about?

My guess is that we would have talked a lot more about population growth and the projected “gap” in meeting water needs. We also would have talked about where this water would have come from, but we would have spent far more time talking about the need for the state and the federal systems to produce this water.

There would have been a good reason for why we would have framed the issue this way. The historic solution to developing water supplies in the west — not just California — has been to “take the water from someplace else.” We’ve all done it. Los Angeles built the Los Angeles Aqueduct to take water from the Owens Valley. San Francisco took water from Hetch Hetchy. Southern California took water from the Colorado River. The San Joaquin Valley took water from Shasta via the Central Valley Project. And most of our communities — north and south -- now take water from the San Francisco Bay Delta via the State Water Project. This pattern of resource development has made California what it is today — the seventh largest economy in the world.

However, today, we live in an era of water limits. We cannot go take the water from somewhere else to meet our needs because there is “nowhere else” to take it from. There are people and special places that exist at the other end of the extensive system of pipes and dams that we have constructed over the past century. They need the water as much as we do.

In fact, we heard from earlier speakers that not only can we no longer just go elsewhere for additional supplies, but also that the existing imported water supplies are oversubscribed. On the Colorado River, Southern California is being required to live within a 4.4 million acre-foot “diet.” On the State Water Project, Con Gasetllum reported that MWD believes that it can reliably take only 25% of the water it originally contracted for. This 450,000 acre-feet of reliable supply is about 50% of what the system has historically been able to deliver to southern California.

The situation facing our communities is complicated by the reality that our patterns of development have exacerbated the water problems facing the state. Santa Monica reported on the water quality problems that have knocked out groundwater wells, forcing the City to go from being 30% dependent on imported water supplies to now being over 70% dependent (a problem they plan to reverse through groundwater treatment). Extensive paving of our groundwater recharge areas has resulted in loss of groundwater supplies as well.

Finally, as we’ve discussed, global trends are also impacting California’s water planning. With rising temperatures, global warming is intensifying the challenges facing the state, changing the timing and type of water that will be available to the state and potentially reducing the amount of water overall.

So what should local government do? This conference laid out a rich array of answers.

Some options are not surprising, like conservation — although who would have thought a toilet could be such a powerful tool for developing water supplies? LA is using the same amount of water as nearly 30 years ago, despite an increase in population of over 1 million people.

Some options are quite surprising. Who would have thought even three years ago that we would have been talking about capturing storm water runoff? Yet it is clear that this source of water holds enormous implications for development of new water supplies for communities.

As suggested by another speaker, one of the challenges facing all of us in this conference is how we will act on the information that has been shared — what will we do to better prepare to comply with the Cost/Kuhl acts?

The other challenge is how do we communicate what we have learned here in Yosemite to others within the local government community — others who urgently need this information to begin to rethink their own water futures.

I went to bed last night thinking of Bob Wilkinson’s cartoon of the bird firmly grasping two bars of its cage, not realizing that there are no other bars holding it in. And I thought: isn’t this the same dilemma that faced the smart growth community over ten years ago when we needed to articulate a new way that we could build our urban areas? And wasn’t the answer from the Local Government Commission to set forward a group of principles — called the Ahwahnee Principles — that would provide local governments with a guide for new urban design? These principles have been distributed, discussed and have ultimately generated a whole new approach to local planning.

I believe our local communities need a similar set of principles to develop a new vision for water resource policy. I believe that the Local Government Commission is comprised of the right people in the right place to articulate these principles. I have taken the liberty of drafting a set of concepts — with great thanks to Bob Wilkinson for his assistance — that may be used as the basis for a whole new approach to water management.

Continued...

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