Drought May Force Controls on Growth : Water: A 20% cutback by the region’s principal importer emphasizes the importance of a guaranteed supply for new projects.

Forced by drought to impose water rationing on constituents, many public officials in Ventura County are now balking at new construction projects and considering tighter controls on future growth.

The drought, now in its fifth year, has proved that the county’s water supply is unreliable. And officials say they must face hard questions about how they can allow more growth when there is not enough water to go around.

“People are asking, ‘If you force us to cut back 10%, 20% or 30%, how can you go ahead and approve new hookups?’ ” Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton said. “That’s a very good question, and the council is going to have to come back with some kind of balance, or moratorium or something.”

In Camarillo, the City Council bought time last week to figure out what the current water shortage means to that city. It put a six-month hold on new building, halting two new golf courses and a housing tract.

“It was kind of a surprise to the developers,” Mayor David Smith said. “But I felt that it was a crisis situation, and we needed to have more information before we could make these kinds of decisions.”

A majority of the county Board of Supervisors said a 20% cutback by the region’s principal water importer on March 1 has emphasized the importance of a guaranteed water supply for new projects.

“Growth is not going to stop completely, but water issues will certainly slow it down,” Supervisor John K. Flynn said.

For Ventura County, where the population has tripled in 30 years, the water shortage has forced recognition that two-thirds of the water for cities is imported from Northern California.

“Water has only been an issue here for the last year,” Flynn said. “But now, every project that comes across the desks of a city council or planning commission, the first thing they’re going to check is where the water is coming from.”

For example, supervisors said that water will be a primary consideration when they vote late this year on a controversial proposal to build 1,800 houses on the sprawling Ahmanson Ranch near Simi Valley.

Regional planners say that Southern California has boomed for at least a decade without a water supply that could meet demand in dry years. New water sources must be found, they say, or the region’s 50-year-long economic surge could stall.

Even 15 years ago, during California’s last major drought, Southland residents rationed water to balance a precarious supply with a spiraling demand.

Since then, population in the six Southern California counties served by the Metropolitan Water District has increased from 9 million people to 15 million, the district reports.

Today, even with normal rainfall, demand has outstripped the MWD’s guaranteed water supply by 13.5%, district spokesman Jay Malinowski said. This year, in the state’s worst drought since the 1930s, guaranteed supply is less than half of demand, he said.

The MWD, which imports water through aqueducts from Northern California and the Colorado River, supplies about two-thirds of the water to Ventura County residents and businesses. All of the county’s fastest-growing areas--Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Camarillo and Oxnard--depend on MWD water.

“We have never told anyone to grow or not to grow. But we have broadcast as widely as possible what we perceive to be the future water-supply picture,” Malinowski said. “Local agencies should take that information and make local water decisions. We have no interest in telling Oxnard, for example, what it should do in terms of growth.”

But the MWD, whose 51-member board has encouraged growth indirectly by promising to provide water to every new dwelling in its vast service area, debated two weeks ago whether it should stop allowing new hookups during droughts. No decision was made.

At least one smaller water agency has acted unilaterally. The Las Virgenes Municipal District, an MWD retailer that supplies 17,000 customers in the Westlake Village-Agoura Hills area, imposed an indefinite moratorium on new hookups last month.

Ventura County’s chief supplier of imported water has taken the same position as the MWD, maintaining that it should not decide whether construction should be slowed or stopped during droughts.

“Whose responsibility is it to make sure resources meet growth? It’s the cities’ and the county’s,” said Jim Hubert, general manager of the Calleguas Municipal Water District.

Whether Southern California can continue to grow and prosper with existing water supplies has been publicly argued for more than a decade.

In 1982, the MWD, corporate farmers and the construction industry supported an unsuccessful state ballot measure to build a peripheral canal across the Sacramento River delta to increase water the State Water Project can deliver to the Southland. Supporters insisted that without the canal, the region’s growth would be stunted.

“I think it was a crying of wolf in 1982, but it really is hitting us in 1991,” said Phillip Vincent, economist and vice president for First Interstate Bancorp in Los Angeles.

Vincent had thought that water supply would not restrict development in the region for another decade, he said, but the drought has forced the issue this year.

In March, planners at the Southern California Assn. of Governments for the first time will consider water as a key factor when undating projections for regional growth by the year 2010, Executive Director Mark Pisano said.

“Water availability has not been a limiting factor,” Pisano said. “We argued we had capacity through water conservation, pricing policies and management to stretch further. There were a number of strategies to meet the shortfall. But we’re in the fifth year of a drought and those policies need to be implemented in earnest.”

Water agencies, including the giant MWD, are studying new water sources as diverse as desalination of ocean water and greater recycling of sewage water. And some politicians and water officials say that the drought will boost support for construction of new dams, reservoirs and canals that would eventually increase the amount of water that can be pumped to this region.

Government support is also increasing for an expanded statewide market where water rights could be easily bought and sold. A free market would enable farmers--who now receive about 85% of California’s water--to sell water rights, at a profit, to cities.

In Ventura County, a task force has begun to study local options. Conservation, waste-water recycling and desalination are high on its list of options.

As officials decide what must be done to weather the drought, they are also focusing on what the water shortage will mean in years to come.

County Supervisors Flynn, Maria VanderKolk and Maggie Erickson Kildee said they think the water crisis has changed the way the county will evaluate new projects.

The Ahmanson Ranch development company has had a contract with the MWD for 25 years that gives it the right to receive state water. Board Chairwoman Erickson Kildee said that would have been good enough a year ago. But now, “I would have to ask MWD, ‘because of the drought, how are you able to say they can get water?’ ”

VanderKolk, elected in June on a slow-growth platform, said water will be “the primary issue for each development for at least a year or two.”

“You can’t, in good conscience, allow a bunch of building to go on when we’re all hurting for water,” she said. “And somewhere along the line, our resources are going to determine how much we can ultimately grow.”

For Donald Brackenbush, president of Ahmanson Land Co., the drought is a problem he hopes will be washed away.

“We really haven’t faced the drought yet,” he said. “We have said to ourselves that since building permits are some years down the line, hopefully we won’t have to face that problem. We’re going to pray for rain.”

Brackenbush said he will argue to supervisors that growth is coming to Ventura County even if his project is rejected. The county’s population increased by 1,165 people a month in the 1980s.

“This is a growing region, and it’s not going to stop,” he said.

While top officials at the county and in Simi Valley and Camarillo are reassessing their positions on growth, council members in Thousand Oaks and Oxnard warned that a moratorium on new water hookups could further harm a weak housing market that already has slowed construction. Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi said his city issued just 100 building permits last year, down from an average of 400 to 500 annually during the 1980s.

“Until we are told by our water suppliers that they don’t want to see any more growth coming in, we will continue to permit new housing and commercial development,” Takasugi said. “We need it.”

The city depends on construction of at least 300 houses a year to pay off bonds for a new city golf course, library and waste-water treatment plant, he said.

Countywide, permits for new dwellings dropped nearly 50% in 1990 to 2,620 because of the weak market, the construction industry reports.

Unlike Oxnard, the county’s largest and poorest city, Thousand Oaks does not need new construction to pay off old debts. But veteran Councilman Alex Fiore said a moratorium on water hookups could ripple through the local economy as builders lay off workers.

“If the drought gets worse, then I think we will be asked by the citizenry for a moratorium,” Fiore said. “But we have to be very careful or we might just put a whole lot of people out of work.”

A spokesman for the Building Industry Assn. of Los Angeles/Ventura counties said a blanket moratorium on water hookups would idle 15,000 workers in the county.

As local governments take another look at growth, the issue may become not how much water is used in the county but how existing supplies are distributed, several local officials said.

Camarillo Mayor Smith and Supervisor VanderKolk noted that agriculture consumes two-thirds of the county’s water and that houses built on farmland often need less water than was pumped to irrigate crops on the same parcel.

“A real critical question is what’s going to happen to agriculture. Is farming really a viable thing to do here anymore?” said VanderKolk, referring to the county’s largest industry.

Business leaders and water agency executives already are arguing, as well, that the drought should not be used as an excuse by slow-growth advocates to stop construction.

“Look at Goleta and Santa Barbara,” said Hubert of the Calleguas water district. “They used water to control growth, and they were the first ones hurt when water dried up, because they didn’t develop new sources of water.”

In fact, the city of Santa Barbara has an option to purchase about a third of its annual water supply from a privately owned desalination plant scheduled for completion in March, 1992, city officials said.

Some Ventura businessmen last year accused the Ventura City Council of imposing its slow-growth philosophy on the community under the guise of a water emergency.

But the council insisted that it adopted the county’s first water-rationing law out of necessity. It is now studying a new $120-million pipeline to bring state water to the city from Lake Piru, though desalination remains an intriguing option, Mayor Richard Francis said.

Some top Ventura County business leaders said the drought already has done enormous damage that may only be felt as regional growth slows in years ahead.

“The drought will end. We’re not going to die of thirst. The crops will get watered somehow,” said William McAleer, chairman of Ventura County National Bank. “But I’m concerned about a greater effect--that it will reduce the movement of business to California.”

McAleer recalled a recent conversation with friends who were thinking of selling their house but were distressed by the effect of the drought on their property.

“They said, ‘Who will want to move to California if they can’t get water?’ ” McAleer said. “And I think there is a perception that California can’t support additional growth. Now, if businesses expand, maybe they’ll think they ought to open a plant in Portland.”