Interview Transcript William Hasencamp Manager. Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Los Angeles.
"Bill Hasencamp is the Manager of Colorado River Resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, where he develops and manages water supply programs to augment Metropolitan’s Colorado River supplies. He has been with Metropolitan for ten years, negotiating water transfer agreements with irrigations districts, water exchange agreements with municipal agencies, and funding new water supply projects which have more than doubled Metropolitan’s Colorado River water supplies since 2003." - WRRC Annual Conference 2011
Date of interview: MAY 6, 2011.
What in your opinion is the definition of sustainability of natural resources like water and why is it important?
Sustainability is being able to continue to provide water supply to meet urban and agricultural needs into the future. What is not sustainable is pumping groundwater that is not recharging faster than it’s being pumped and eventually the groundwater wells will dry up and that’s not sustainable. Or relying on a river that is drying up because of climate change or other uses is not sustainable. But what is sustainable is to have a plan that adapts to conditions so that we can continue to have water in the future and it’s important so that the economy can continue to grow and rely on that sustainability and not have to risk being cut back from water shortages.
The Metropolitan Water District is the largest supplier of treated water in the United States. What challenges do you face to supply water to such a large population?
We get water from two places, the Sacramento Bay Delta Area in Northern CA and the Colorado River out near the Arizona border. Both of those supplies have been cut back in recent years. The Bay Delta in Northern CA, the fish population might become extinct so we have had to reduce our pumping to protect the fish populations up there and it’s been a major challenge to adapt to less water for Northern CA. So what we’ve been doing is to try to build a facility that can deliver water south without killing fish. It’s going to take a long time to have the facility done but it needs to be done so that the fish won’t become extinct and we can get water from Northern CA. On the Colorado river, the problem we have there is drought and climate change. Climate change has forecast the river to become less reliable in the future and so we have to figure out how to live with less water and we’ve been delivering less water from the Colorado River to CA, but we’ve managed to keep our supplies up by partnering with agriculture, paying farmers to plow the land on a voluntary basis and then we would get the water from that supply but climate change is something that is going to be a big concern as we move forward.
What makes you care about the fish, is it because of environmental rules?
The Congress adopted the Endangered Species Act that says that you cannot have fish become extinct and that’s because every species is important and there is something that can be found valuable in every species becoming extinct and that was the concern. And that there were a few species that only live in the Sacramento River that could become extinct if we didn’t take actions to protect them.
How is river water managed today instead of building dams and destroying natural habitats?
We haven’t built dams on rivers in many, many decades. The real, last big dam on a river was in the 1970s, Newmolonas Dam in Northern CA. Now we build dams off of rivers so they don’t destroy habitats. We recently built a reservoir near Hemet that was on dry land and we dammed a valley and filled it with water and that way it didn’t impact fish or other species that rely on the streams. Another thing that we do is to partner with agricultural and other agencies so we don’t need to divert as much. Despite our population growing by 5 million people in southern CA in the last 10 years, our water use has stayed flat. So we can provide the same amount of water to the same amount of people and that’s because we are using more recycled water and desalinating groundwater that is currently too salty to use. And a general conservation ethic is to understand how valuable water is and in general how their habitats have improved so they are using less water.
What economic lessons and consequences do you think we have learned from Hetch Hetchy?
Hetch Hetchy was a sad case,in that originally Congress established Yosemite National Park to protect the park and San Francisco needed a water supply and there were several options available to them but Hetch Hetchy was the cheapest and at the time there was opposition but there was still no environmental laws for protection that we have today. And then there’s the San Francisco Fire and Earthquake and SF ran out of water so they used the momentum from that earthquake to let them go ahead and make legislation that allowed for the use of Hetch Hetchy. That may have caused the untimely death of John Muir, who was very much opposed to that. But I think we’ve learned that we need to make choices that today protect the environment but still allow for water supply; that means it’s going to cost more, so water bills cost more today than it did back then and people will pay more in the future but those options are better to both protect the environment and meet the needs because often there is more than one way to get this but in Hetch Hetchy’s case it was a different time than it is today and we certainly wouldn’t do anything like that today.
Have you encountered similar water management debates in supplying water to southern CA?
Every day. Every project has a debate associated with it. Whether it is building a desalination plant, a lot of people say that we have a great, big ocean, let’s desalinate ocean water and provide it to people but the debate is that desalination plants kill ocean life and no one wants to see a desalination plant on the coast. If we buy water from farmers, that’s a good thing because the farmers get the money and they get to not have to grow crops but on the downside we need food in this country and food surplus is a good thing when the farmers go at it. Every time you do any action there’s usually a reaction that has to be considered and the debate over the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley is impacted by agricultural drainage water and by making the farmers more efficient, less water is drained into the sea so it’s less impacted by the debate there without negatively impacting the environment. So every project has a debate and discussion but in the end we can usually reach a compromise to keep everyone happy.
Do you think Hetch Hetchy influenced the creation of the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) seeing that it came right after the dam was built?
I don’t think it influenced the creation. But what did influence its creation was the aqueduct in the Owens Valley that was to supply Los Angeles’ need. So we looked into the Colorado River, because that was the next supply of water but then we realized that any given city didn’t have the resources to build an aqueduct that far enough across the desert. So 13 cities originally got together to form the MWD, to pool their resources and then later another 13 agencies joined so now there’s a total of 26 member agencies from San Diego to Los Angeles to Ventura County that pooled their resources together so that each city doing their own project was inefficient so instead they began collaboration.
What position do you think you would’ve taken in this debate or issue?
It’s hard to say because that was a different time than it is today. But I happen to enjoy Yosemite National Park and I can imagine a world today where if the dam had never been built what that valley would’ve looked like and what things I would’ve done in that valley so I would like to believe that if I were around 100 years ago I would have urged the city of San Francisco to look at other options. It would’ve been a tough sell because people didn’t care as much about the environment. Yosemite was so far away, there weren’t really cars to get there, people didn’t look at it as a big recreation area back then. It wasn’t until much later when people realized the value of our natural resources and that’s why they established things like the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act that prevented a number of rivers from being dammed and the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s to make sure that no species would go extinct and other environmental regulations. So today, it would never happen, unfortunately it did back then but we just have to be vigilant that other things in the future don’t happen like that.
So do you think Hetch Hetchy and how there was less analysis of its future consequences, that that has changed and now we have much more critique on damming a valley or park?
We would never build a dam in a National Park today. We don’t build dams anymore, on the river systems, maybe offline where there’s little impact but absolutely that would never happen today and we have laws today to protect that.