September 20, 2022
October 25, 2022
The Municipal Water District has one job: Import water to Orange County from the increasingly climate-starved Sierras and Colorado River.
Low profile or not, MWDOC is OC's climate change battleground.
OC deserves:
I am a 4th generation Californian and 1st generation college graduate. My PhD is from MIT. Marta and I have raised our 2 boys in Irvine since 1990. They're big now!
A policy scholar, water consultant and UCLA professor, I worked on complex water challenges worldwide. I taught water management to a generation of graduate water students.
We can be grateful for the good track records of most local water governments, enforced by smart environmental laws and excellent staff. But we cannot rely exclusively on the engineering mindset that built our thirsty communities.
Fresh, collaborative, and diverse expertise are key to ensuring a safe, reliable, and sustainable water future.
The Municipal Water District of OC is the most important local government you never heard of.
This agency, aka MWDOC, provides half OC's water. All sources are mega climate-stressed. It needs to rapidly pivot. You elect its leaders.
Water is life and climate change is changing life as usual. Only informed planning will protect our lifestyles and manage water rates.
What it does: The Municipal Water District imports half OC's water from the despairingly dry Sierras and Colorado River, experiencing their worst megadrought in 1,200 years -- and facing twice as likely megastorms predicted to flood dams and waterways. That's right: The dry years will be drier, the wet wetter. And we are not prepared.
For the facts, check the status of its reservoirs here and the lack of progress on managing the Colorado River here. Unfortunately you won't this info on MWDOC's home or headline news pages.
The good news: Unlike San Francisco Water (2+ million people) or the San Diego County Water Authority (3+ million) or the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (19+ million), MWDOC has its own elected Board of Directors from across the county.
You control MWDOC leadership directly with your vote.
Make OC healthy and prepared. Vote for smarter long term planning.
I taught at UC Irvine before appointed Professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Policy and the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability.
I was Visiting Professor at Harvard, Visiting Senior Scholar at the World Resources Institute, Fulbright Professor at El Colegio de México, and an active water management consultant.
Among these projects, we designed structural governance reforms for the problematic water system of the San Francisco Bay Area -- at the request of the State of California.
Not unlike MWDOC, San Francisco imports hundreds of millions of gallons of water daily hundreds of miles (from the Sierra's Hetch Hetchy). It mostly wholesales that to more than 2 million people in 29 other Bay Area governments.
MWDOC resells its imports to 27 Orange County retail water agencies, who resell it again to more than 2 million residents.
For the World Bank, I pursued water equity reform in Jakarta Indonesia and Sana'a & Taiz Yemen, and city planning reform in Vietnam. I worked for the Harvard University Institute of International Development on water and national fiscal policy in Indonesia and Kenya.
I also studied water in Mexico (now running short of its share of the Colorado River, a possible harbinger of things to come here) and Thailand.
I gave more than two dozen invited talks in China, Korea, the Philippines and the UK on urbanization pressures on public resources and finances. I recently worked with the OECD and Asian Development Bank on incorporating equity into national sustainability.
Beyond these projects, I taught water governance and management to decades of graduate students at UCI and UCLA.
I publish widely on urban development and governance. (I am cited in peer-reviewed publications nearly 6,000 times.) I was editor-in-chief of the flagship Journal of the American Planning Association and am co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
I am an active member of the Board of Directors of the solar power advocacy nonprofit OC Goes Solar. We partner with the City of Irvine to run its Solarize Irvine campaign, helping residents afford and produce their own power.
The State Water Project
California State Water Project aqueduct
Colorado River Basin
Colorado River Drought