www.sdchamber.org

President's Update

By Ruben Barrales, President & Chief Executive Officer

On November 2 and 3, the Chamber’s Water Committee was invited by the Metropolitan Water

District of California (MWD), in partnership with the San Diego County Water Authority (CWA),

to fly to Sacramento and tour the State Water Project-San Joaquin Delta to learn firsthand how dependent San Diego’s water supply is on a “healthy” Delta.  San Diego imports approximately 85% of its water supply from the Delta and the Colorado River.  About two-thirds of the water we receive through MWD comes from the Delta.  However, the Delta is in an ecological crisis that threatens people as well as the environment.

Aging levees in the Delta are at risk of a natural disaster that could cripple water deliveries for an extended period of time.  Experts warn that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake would cause substantial damage to the levees, resulting in severe flooding of communities and farmland, allowing the intrusion of salt water into the Delta’s fresh water and dramatically disrupting the statewide water supply and delivery system.

A recent federal court ruling cut water supplies from the Delta by up to one-third to protect an endangered fish, the Delta smelt.  The San Francisco Bay area, Central and Southern California will see a significant reduction in available water supplies because of this court action.

Statewide water reserves are extremely low and would not be able to meet public demand during a major disruption to the state’s water delivery system. 

While more conservation is definitely needed, simply using less water will not fix our water supply problem.  The collective impacts of court-ordered supply reductions, drought, climate change, increased population demands and/or potential natural disasters are too huge to be solved by conservation alone.  Water managers are also worried about a prolonged, statewide drought.  This year was one of the driest years on record.  Another record-dry year, combined with the cutbacks, will spell disaster for a system that already struggles to meet the needs of people and the environment. Couple this fact with the recent fires that have swept throughout California; fighting them to protect life and property is tapping into valuable water reserves that were already low.

This tour was a sobering learning experience for the Chamber’s Water Committee.  We are in a real water crisis and cannot afford to ignore it.  While your Chamber urges you to conserve water, we have also joined an alliance of Southern California business organizations, including the Los Angeles and Long Beach Chambers of Commerce as well as the Orange County Business Council to ensure that Southern California gets its fair allocation from a proposed 2008 water bond in order to develop projects that provide new water supplies. We are also partnering with CWA, MWD and the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) on educating our members about the critical challenges that are confronting the state’s water supply and delivery system.  For more information, please visit www.calwatercrisis.org