The September 22nd luncheon meeting of TownHall Los Angeles featured Jeffrey Kightlinger, General Manager and CEO of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as the featured speaker, who spoke about the drought, the water bond, groundwater and more. Here’s what he had to say:
Mr. Kightlinger began with the history and background of the Metropolitan Water District. “Most people don’t really know about us and exactly what it is that Metropolitan does, and frankly as a utility, we kind of like that. We think you should be able to turn on the tap and expect water to be there 24/7, 365 and not really have to worry about it very much. But this year we want you to pay a little bit of attention.”
He then explained how Metropolitan Water District became the wholesaler for all of Southern California. The City of Los Angeles and their Department of Water and Power built an aqueduct system up to the Owens Valley in the early 1900s and started delivering water in 1913. They thought they had enough water for 50 years to come, but a lot of the cities starting forming their own cities instead of annexing to Los Angeles, and Southern California started growing really fast. By the 1920s, they realized that more water was needed for Southern California.
[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]“The 5200 square mile service area that we deliver water to is home to 19 million people, so it’s a pretty small piece of California – less than 1/20th of all of the land mass in California, but it’s 1 in every 2 Californians. … our purpose is to make sure we have enough water for that.”[/pullquote]The City of LA wanted to build a system to bring Colorado River water to Southern California, but lacked enough assessed valuation to raise the money to build it. “The city attorney’s office came up with this idea,” said Mr. Kightlinger. “What if we bring in all of those neighboring cities – Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills – that group could do it. That would be a big enough base for rates and for property taxes to support this new infrastructure.”
And so the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California was formed in 1928 to build the Colorado River Aqueduct and deliver water to the cities, and the cities would do the retail job of delivering to their households, he said.
“What has happened over time is that we’ve grown and expanded to cover all of Southern California,” he said. “Originally we were 13 cities, primarily in Los Angeles County and the three cities in Orange County, and that was our 1928 structure. As we sit here today, we now cover from Ventura County in the north, all of Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, and San Diego County. That 5200 square mile service area that we deliver water to is home to 19 million people, so it’s a pretty small piece of California, less than 1/20th of all of the land mass in California, but it’s 1 in every 2 Californians. We have 38 million people in the state; one of every two Californians is crammed in here and our purpose is to make sure we have enough water for that.”
“It’s also a significant amount of the state’s economy which is why it’s very important to talk to business groups so that they understand this. California’s annual economy is somewhere around $1.7-1.8 trillion GDP. Over a trillion dollars of that is here in Southern California, so we’re about 50 percent of the state’s population and about 60-some percent of our state’s economy right here in Southern California.”
Metropolitan started delivering Colorado River water to Southern California in the 1930s, and the thinking at the time was that it would be enough for the indefinite future. However, population boomed in the 1940s and 1950s post-World War II, and it was clear by the 1950s, we were going to have to get a new water supply, he said.
“So in 1960, Southern California and Metropolitan worked very closely with Governor Pat Brown at the time and agreed to go build the State Water Project,” he said. “If you’ve ever driven Highway 5, that canal is the California Aqueduct. That is the SWP that delivers water to a little over 2.5 million acres of farmland in the Central Valley, and delivers water to Metropolitan so we can deliver it to urban Southern California. It also delivers water to the Silicon Valley and parts of the East Bay in the Bay Area.”
“That project was a remarkable achievement. It was at the time the biggest, most expensive water project ever built anywhere in the world, and to make it financially doable, the payments had to be spread out. So Metropolitan, with a fair amount of arm twisting from Pat Brown at the time, signed onto a contract that said that we will pay 50% of the cost of this project for the next 75 years. Our contract with the State of California runs through 2035, and to give you an example of what the cost is, Metropolitan’s annual budget is about $1.8 billion per year. This year, the check we wrote to the State of California for our share of the State Water Project was about $600 million, so it’s about a third of our annual budget every single year to help fund the capital and the O&M costs of this huge massive infrastructure project.”
[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]”When we went into this drought 2 to 3 years ago, Metropolitan had about 3.5 MAF of water in storage … By the end of this year, we expect to be about 1 MAF of water in storage, so we’ve gone through a little more than two-thirds of our storage in the last three years, so obviously this can’t go on indefinitely.”[/pullquote]
Mr. Kightlinger then summarized where Southern California’s water comes from. “The City of Los Angeles gets only a small piece of it from the Owens Valley – about 5%,” he said. “We get about 30% of our water from Northern California through the State Water Project; we get another 25% from the Colorado River Aqueduct, add those up and it’s about 60% of Southern California’s water. The other 40% is what we call local water. … It comes from our groundwater basins and the little bit of rainfall that we get every year that we can then capture, put in our groundwater basins and pump it up through wells. We have very productive groundwater basins in the San Fernando Valley and San Gabriel Valley and Orange County, but aside from that, 60% is coming anywhere from 250 to 450 miles away from here. It’s moving over pumps, it’s moving over mountains, it’s moved through aqueducts and tunnels, we capture it, we then move it into reservoirs, and then we bring it out to people.”
Mr. Kightlinger then turned to the current year’s drought. “The situation this year is pretty much unprecedented,” he said. “Now we’ve prepared for drought cycles, it’s what we do, so you haven’t seen this huge dislocation here in Southern California. You haven’t seen this big drying up and 50% rationing because we’ve prepared for this. We know we get periodic three to five year droughts in California, but this year – I’ve never seen a drought anything like this in our experience. You have to go back looking at tree rings almost 500 years to find comparable droughts to what we’re in this year. This year it’s a little different in the sense that not only has there been virtually no rain and snow … but this has also been an incredibly hot year. This year is averaging about 5 to 6 degrees a day hotter than usual in Southern California. Normally we would break temperature records, we do it in two-tenths of a degree, so 5 to 6 degrees would be like breaking the 100 meter dash by 2 to 4 seconds. … This year it’s off the charts, so we’re incredibly hot and incredibly dry, very low snowpack, and so our system’s been very stressed.”
“The good news is as I said, we prepared for this,” he said, explaining that Metropolitan sells water by the ‘acre-foot’ which is roughly 326,000 gallons. “Metropolitan sells a little over 2 to 2.3 – 2.4 million acre-feet (MAF) of water a year which works out to about 2 billion gallons of water we deliver every single day over the course of a year. We get 1.4 MAF from the Colorado River in a very good year, we get another 1 to 1.5 MAF from Northern California, and in some of the good years we have a little bit extra. We’re selling 2 MAF and we’re getting about 2.5 MAF, so we’ve been banking that water for these droughts.”
“When we went into this drought 2 to 3 years ago, Metropolitan had about 3.5 MAF of water in storage, so that’s a year and a half’s worth of total supply put in our reservoirs and our groundwater basins all banked for this drought. The last couple of years, we’ve been pulling it down. By the end of this year, we expect to be about 1 MAF of water in storage, so we’ve gone through a little more than two-thirds of our storage in the last three years, so obviously this can’t go on indefinitely. If it doesn’t rain, if doesn’t snow, then we’re going to have to pull down the rate at which we’re going through our storage.”
“The good news is in Southern California, we’ve been telling people voluntarily to conserve and we’re seeing a lot of response to it,” he said. “Last year, we sold about 2.4 MAF; this year, a record breaking dry year, and when its dry, people need to use a little more water, we’re selling about 2.1, so we’ve been pushing conservation, and people have been conserving.”
Mr. Kightlinger said that the response to rebate programs has been ‘phenemenal, just off the charts’ with rebate programs for turf removal estimated to have resulted in70 million square-feet of grass removed. He’s already asked the Board to double the funding for rebate programs, and will probably do so again. “People are really responding and they are reacting well, and we’re seeing it in terms of water sales dropping, so that’s good news. We’re seeing a strong reaction in Southern California.”
But that can only carry us so far, Mr. Kightlinger pointed out. “We can always continue to push down demand, but at some point we have to work on the supply side of the equation as well so Metropolitan has put together a long-range game plan,” he said. “We’re still growing in Southern California. We grow somewhere around about 150 to 200,000 people a year, so it’s one thing to live within our means, but it’s another how are we going to handle this growth. This growth comes from basically the local birth rate, so it’s not growth that’s likely to vanish over night. It’s something that is going to continue.”
“California is project to go from 38 million to 50 million people somewhere after 2050, and Southern California is project to go from 19 million to 25 million, so we’re still going to be 50% of the state even 35 years from now,” he said. “So we have to come up with a game plan to get more water. Now it used to be fairly easy. We used to just go out to the Colorado River, go up to Northern California, we used to think at some point we were going to go to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Columbia, but the days of building those massive relocation infrastructure projects are pretty much done.”
“So what we’ve done since the 90s is come up with a new game plan which basically has three pieces to it,” he said. “One is to make sure our existing sources of water, Colorado River, Northern California, and local supplies remain reliable, and to do what we can to firm up their reliability. Second, develop new sources for all of that incoming growth – new sources meaning conservation, recycling, reclamation, desalination, all of those things we’ve been doing since the early 1990s. The third piece is to build storage. We never used to have storage in Southern California. We’ve always figured on the just in time philosophy because storage is really expensive. Building big dams, reservoirs, putting water in the ground and the reservoirs, it costs a lot of money.”
[pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”30%”]“From 1990, we had 14 million people in Southern California and that year, Metropolitan delivered 2.5 MAF. This year with 19 million people, we’ve had to deliver 2.1 MAF. We’re accommodating more people with less water, and the way we’ve done that is primarily through water efficiency. That’s been our number one tool.”[/pullquote]“So we came up with this game plan in the 1990s. We’ve invested about $4-4.5 billion in new storage programs. It helped us out in the drought from 2006-09, and it’s been helping us out in this record breaking drought to the point that we haven’t really seen incredible dislocation here in Southern California, despite the fact that we’re going through a historic, record-breaking unprecedented drought – because we have that storage and because we’ve prepared for it.”
“From 1990, we had 14 million people in Southern California and that year, Metropolitan delivered 2.5 MAF,” he said. “This year with 19 million people, we’ve had to deliver 2.1 MAF. We’re accommodating more people with less water, and the way we’ve done that is primarily through water efficiency. That’s been our number one tool. … The rough number from the early 1990s was about 330 gallons per capita per day; today it’s a little over 150, so we cut the water consumption that we needed to make life work here in Southern California roughly in half. Our goal is to continue to push that number down further.”
“We also have been doing other things,” he said. “We recycled virtually no water in 1990; now Southern California recycles heading on close to 10% of its total water supply. That’s a pretty big number; it’s the biggest of anywhere in the United States. The only places that you find that are bigger are when you going to Spain who is recycling 17-18%, Israel about 75% … We’ve done more brackish water desalination; we have over 70-some plants do some form of recycled water, brackish water desalination throughout Southern California. We’ve been funding all of these for the last 20 years. Every year Metropolitan partners up with members and we fund these. These have enabled us to continue to live within our existing supplies.”
But in years like this, the whole system gets stressed, so a couple of things happened, he said. “Normally water is a pretty boring subject most of the time, but now people care about it and are interested in it, and the legislature responded, so they passed a water bond this year. It’s something our board has voted to support. We hope you’ll take a good hard look at it when it comes up on the ballot this November. It has about $7.5 billion for a lot of good water projects, some of it for building new storage for the state, new reservoirs – most of them would likely be in northern California, but they would be good for all of California.”
“Metropolitan built a major reservoir that came online around 2000 called Diamond Valley Lake,” he said. “It’s the last major reservoir built in the state since the 1960s. We have not kept pace with investing in our infrastructure and yet we continue to grow. California used to build a lot of big projects; we stopped building a generation ago, so this $7.5 billion, a big chunk of it for new reservoirs, for new storage. A chunk of it for groundwater cleanup; we’ve contaminated a lot of our groundwater basins here in Southern California, so that’s all positive, and then a lot of it for groundwater management as well as a number of other local projects – recycling, reclamation projects. All good things our board supports so please take a look at that.”
“The other thing the legislature did was pass a bill that is going to really push groundwater regulation,” he said. “California has been a pretty goofy state. We are heavily regulated, as most of you in the business sector are aware, but the one area that we’ve completely left alone is groundwater regulation. California was the only state left without a comprehensive groundwater regulation program in the entire country. Here in Southern California, we’ve done a good job managing our basins because we had to, because we had a lot of population, so we basically set up regulation schemes in all of our groundwater basins in Southern California, but when you went to the Central Valley and parts of Northern California, it was truly the wild west. You pumped whatever you wanted, you didn’t have to file reports, and that’s changed. We’ve now passed some legislation to do that and it really took the drought to get the political will to finally make something happen on that front, and it’s been sorely needed for decades.”
“One last thing … I said part of our game plan was to firm up our water supply. Metropolitan has worked very aggressively on the Colorado River. The Colorado River has been hit by a drought that started in 2000 and it’s a big chunk of our water supply, so we have worked and invested hundreds of millions of dollars, probably billions of dollars, working with the rest of the entities that get Colorado River water in California, but also with the states of Arizona and Nevada that we share the river with. We have trading programs and we trade water with Las Vegas. We bank water in Arizona. We have paid farmers in the Palo Verde Valley over by Blythe to fallow land. We’ve lined canals. We’ve invested in this over the last 15 years.”
“We also did some pretty smart things,” Kightlinger said. “We’ve worked with Congress to get a 50 year extension of our water power that comes out of Hoover Dam that moves the aqueduct. We basically got Congress to authorize it and we continue to do that through 2067. … We’re really trying to think ahead on water. We also did 50 years of endangered species permits that we entered into, so we have really buttoned up the Colorado River to really look forward for the next 50 years, doing everything we can, except make it rain and snow.”
“We are trying to do the same thing in our Northern California supply. We’ve worked with the Governor’s administration to come up with this thing called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The big weak link in moving water from north to south is what’s called the Bay-Delta. It’s an area outside of the city of Stockton and it’s this area of channels that is basically at sea level. We’re trying to move water north-south through these channels that really want to move east-west and push water out to the Golden Gate. And it’s created all sorts of conflicts, it confuses the native fish, we have endangered species conflicts every day of the week running throughout that Bay-Delta, and it’s cost us a huge amount of our water supply and the reliability of it.”
“So what we have come up is a very complex plan – it’s going to restore 100,000 acres of habitat, it’s going to give us long-term endangered species permits, and it’s going to build a couple of tunnels that bypass the Delta and just move the water completely underneath it that’s for drinking water, and then leave the water in the Delta for the endangered species. At its root, it’s pretty simple; it’s a bypass and an endangered species restoration. But actually it’s pretty complex; California water politics is complex. And very controversial, so the Governor is still committed to pushing this forward. The idea is that it will come to a final decision in mid-2015.”
“So it’s a real year of decision making in water. We’ve had the water bond, we’ve had groundwater regulation, we had this Bay Delta Conservation Plan coming up over the next 12 months, so stay tuned and stay interested. I think these are very important things.”
“Normally Southern California sits out the water debates and leaves them to Northern California and the Central Valley farmers to really debate and argue about it, but it is pretty critical to our business,” he said. “We’re about 60% of the state’s economy here in Southern California. If you look at the Central Valley, California grows something along the lines of 80% the world’s pistachios, almonds, walnuts – you go down the list. We are the provider of fruits and nuts to the whole world, and it’s pretty critical that we continue to shore up our water supply to continue to live in this world … “
“And so with that, do try and stay engaged on these issues. Let the Governor and your local elected know that it’s not just a Central Valley issue. Southern California cares about these issues as well.”
“And with that … “
