Perhaps you’ve heard about “Memento,” a movie about a man who forgets anything that happened more than a few minutes earlier.
His last memory is a fuzzy recollection of his wife’s murder, and his life has become a series of frantic attempts to scribble down notes and ink tattooed clues on his body to help track down her killer.
The movie raises a lot of larger questions about the malleability of memory and the infinite possibilities for self-deception. Offered for your perusal is a “Memento” companion guide, drawing on a real-life conflict that has bedeviled the world of Southern California water policy.
The San Diego County Water Authority, like the “Memento” character, is haunted by a traumatic event , water cutbacks in the final years of the 1987-1992 drought. Like the film’s protagonist, the Water Authority’s leadership is articulate and determined, but constantly suffering the self-inflicted wounds of a sieve-like memory.
The Water Authority forgets that it actually survived the drought fairly well. Before the drought, San Diego County was vulnerable because it had been getting a major portion of its water supply at huge discounts, knowing full well that it could be interrupted during a drought.
In response to the authority’s pleas to be released from those commitments, the Metropolitan Water District’s board of directors provided relief from those arrangements. Metropolitan established a drought plan that offered other agencies powerful incentives to rely on their own groundwater, freeing up more imported water for San Diego County. As a result, the county suffered smaller supply cutbacks than many other parts of California.
That matters little to Water Authority leaders in their amnesiatic crusade for justice. The Water Authority’s body politic is tattooed with statements. One says “Change wheeling charge,” the price assessed for letting non-Metropolitan water flow through the MWD’s conveyance system. So the Water Authority dutifully lobbies for special-interest legislation, perennially forgetting that it already received a change in the wheeling charge as part of Metropolitan’s proposed new rate structure.
Incorrect Conclusions
Other tattoos contain declarations like “Blame Los Angeles” and “Change preferential water rights.” They have to be constantly reminded that during the last drought, these water rights were never invoked. It was San Diego’s lack of local groundwater and reservoir storage capacity that made it vulnerable, not preferential rights.
We end up with a number of “Memento”-type scenes, such as when the Water Authority decides to spend ratepayers’ money on a lawsuit to get paper water rights (not real water).
After that, four board members representing the authority walk into a closed session to discuss legal strategy, demanding a front-row seat when 25 fellow MWD member agencies decide how to defend themselves against San Diego’s lawsuit.
The amnesia continues when they are served with an MWD lawsuit that would bar them from the sessions.
“But we’re board members,” they cry, insisting they would never reveal the content of what they hear to the litigants.
They forget they are the litigants. How can they claim impartiality? Have they forgotten the concept of conflict of interest?
In the end, the “Memento” character is repeatedly asked: How do you know you haven’t already accomplished your goal? This is a particularly relevant question for the Water Authority, which has obtained many of its goals with the proposed new water rate structure, currently being finalized by the Metropolitan board amid San Diego’s objections.
Stability A Benefit
For example, the new rate structure grants the Water Authority’s demand that agencies enter into long-term contracts. The resulting water rate stability benefits everyone, but it particularly helps San Diego, which is heavily dependent on MWD’s imported water.
In movies and real life, people don’t act out of purely altruistic motives. But sometimes the people you think are “enemies” are actually offering to help, while those who tender help (say, through a water wheeling deal or a plan to build an expensive new aqueduct) aren’t necessarily going to make things better.
Making matters worse is that the Water Authority deludes itself into thinking it was forced into a shotgun marriage with Metropolitan in the 1940s, depriving it of a chance to get a cheaper, more reliable water supply.
What Water Authority leaders fail to realize is that, for all the disagreements, the relationship with Metropolitan has been very cost-effective. And, with more investment in such self-reliant measures as conservation, water recycling and local storage, the region would do much to solve its own problems.
San Diego not only victimizes itself with its lack of memory; it also ends up persecuting and manipulating others. Unlike the main character of “Memento,” Water Authority leaders can be healed; they just need to wake up and change.
Pace has served on Metropolitan Water District’s board of directors since 1995 and is in his second term as board chair. He represents the Central Basin Municipal Water District, which serves 1.4 million Los Angeles County residents in 27 communities.
