The Monterey Amendments to State Water Project Contracts: A History

Policy statement: C-WIN works to overturn the Monterey Plus amendments to the State Water Project contracts. To return the state mandated “Urban Preference”; to require the contracts to reflect water that is really there; to stop the abusive pumping of water that is not surplus; and to return the Kern Water Bank to the public to firm up the urban preference for the 22 million urban water users south of the Delta in times of drought.

Drought from 1987 to 1992, and again in 1994, financial crisis among state water contractors, and the prospect of tighter regulation of Delta exports by the State Water Project (SWP) by the state and federal government provoked the project’s most serious crisis. In 1994 four of the SWP contractors, including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and the Kern County Water Agency which together control about 75 percent of State Water Project allocations, and representatives from Paramount Farming (a private company), met secretly in Monterey to attempt to resolve their water shortage dilemma. The result was the Monterey Amendments to the State Water Project water service contracts.