Los Angeles, City of Water

This region, known as highly dependent on imported water, has “become, of all things, a leader in sustainable water management, a pioneer in big-city use of cost-effective, environmentally beneficial water conservation, collection and reuse technologies.” However Lesliedec also quotes Mark Pestrella, Deputy Director of Los Angeles County Flood Control District and Public Works Department as saying “Governance is probably the biggest obstacle to a sustainable water supply.”

The op-ed noted the findings of the recently published article by Miriam Cope and Stephanie Pincetl at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability as an example of the complex water governance challenges in the Los Angeles Region. That article “Confronting Standards and Nomenclature in Spatial Data Infrastructures: A Case Study of Urban Los Angeles County Geospatial Water Management Data“.

This article focusses on the difficulty of even mapping the boundaries of all of the water wholesalers, and the one hundred water retailers in Los Angeles County south and west of the San Gabriel Mountains. That effort to map these retailers was hampered by a lack of California standards and nomenclature for defining these boundaries, a lack of regulatory efforts to insure that mapping was done and conflicting boundaries resolved. These retailers, ranging from cities to special districts, from irrigation districts to private water companies that are multinational regulated private water utilities, and to mutual water companies that represent small communities that created these nonprofit corporations as they developed. All of these water retailers have different sources of water, and different regulating agencies.

The question about whether all of these retailers can succeed in this shift to local sustainable water is the subject of further investigation by IoES investigators, including Pincetl, Gold and Glickfeld. They will be examining the governance of stormwater, recycled water, and groundwater, and how the governance system might adapt to the new challenges of local water resources.

Read the NY TImes article here