Los Angeles v. Common Sense

Re: Chinatown (1974)/Water Rights

Why does Los Angeles exist?  Where does L.A. get its water?  How do water rights work?

Sources:

County of Inyo v. City of Los Angeles, 124 Cal.App.3d 1 (Cal.App. 1981).

County of Inyo v. Yorty, 32 Cal.App. 795 (Cal.App. 1973).

County of Mono v. City of Los Angeles,  81 Cal.App.5th 65 (Cal.App. 2022).

Irwin v. Phillips, 5 Cal. 140 (Cal. 1855).

People v. City of Los Angeles, 34 Cal.2d 695 (Cal. 1950).

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). 2022-2023 Briefing Book. www.ladwp.com/sites/default/files/2023-10/2022-23_Briefing_Book_Online.pdf

Marc Reisner. Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. New York, NY: Penguin Books (2017); orig. ed. Viking (1986).

Sarah Dean. “Taps running dry have become part of daily life in South Africa’s biggest city.” CNN, March 24, 2024.

Denise Chow and Albinson Linares. “Mexico City's 21 million residents are facing a severe water shortage.” NBC News, March 1, 2024.

Written, Researched, and Recorded by Céleste Young, 2023-2025.
Music: Out On My Skateboard - Mini Vandals

Waitisthatlegal@gmail.com

Transcript

In the United States and Canada, pretty much every household has access to clean, drinkable water delivered straight to the taps in our homes.  It can be difficult to imagine living life without such easy access to water, and even harder to understand the infrastructure in place to ensure it gets there.  In some areas it is a fairly direct route, if you get water from a well the route is very direct, city water usually comes from a nearby river or lake and is treated and delivered through underground pipes.  However, there are some places that do not have natural, nearby sources of water and the system gets a lot more complicated.

When you look at the greatest cities in history, and even the largest cities that exist today, a theme tends to emerge.  They are almost all on large rivers.  The reasons behind this trend are pretty obvious.  Rivers provide a source of fresh water, a means of transportation, and a place to efficiently get rid of waste.  Cities that are not near a river have to address those things through other means.  The biggest cities in the world that were not founded on rivers are Johannesburg, South Africa; Mexico City, Mexico; and Los Angeles, United States.  

Mexico City is facing a serious water crisis as drought and infrastructure issues (mainly from leaking pipes) force the City to enforce water rationing.  Mexico City was founded on an old lake bed and has a substantial aquifer underneath the plateau, but continued unchecked population growth and poor city planning has caused its rapid depletion.  Johannesburg is in similar dire circumstances.  Johannesburg started out as a gold mining town and is also situated on a plateau.  Its current water crisis is fed more by infrastructure failures than by lack of water, although they have also had crises caused by drought.

Los Angeles was also founded in an area with no river or reliable water source.  The Los Angeles River was seasonal at best, but usually consisted of a dry river bed.  The early population relied on an aquifer, but as the city grew the aquifer was quickly drained leaving Los Angeles with no sources of natural water supply.  It’s actually incredible the city exists at all.  Unlike Mexico City it is not built on the site of an ancient city.  And unlike Johannesburg, Los Angeles has very few natural resources.  They did have a brief oil boom which is what spurred on the initial growth in population and led to the need for the city to find alternate sources of water.  It is even unusual amongst its California brethren.  San Francisco is located on a natural harbor and was near the gold rush sites.  Even San Diego, which is also essentially in the desert, has a large natural harbor that has a port and a large U.S. Naval Base.  Los Angeles has nice beaches, but no natural harbor, although that didn’t stop them from creating one.  That is a different story altogether from the one I will be examining today.  No, today I will tell you the story of how Los Angeles tricked and swindled their way into a water source that continues to supply the City to this day and the fictional screenplay this episode in history inspired.

The movie, Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, was released in 1974.  The movie is set in Los Angeles in 1937 and tells the story of the San Fernando Land Syndicate through the eyes of Nicholson’s private eye character, Jake Gittes.  Jake is unwittingly drawn into the middle of the conspiracy when he is hired by Evelyn Mulwray to figure out who murdered her husband, the chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Hollis Mulwray.  Along the way he discovers a plot by Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father, to manufacture a drought by dumping water from the reservoirs and then buying up land in the Northwest Valley from desperate farmers.  They also pressured Hollis Mulwray to approve another dam project and killed him when he uncovered their plot.

As is usually the case, the real story is much more bizarre, involves way more people, and does not include murder.  Just like its fictional counterpart though, everyone involved got away with it.  The real story starts back in the late 1800s when the railroads to the West had been completed and fare wars made it incredibly cheap to travel to California.  In the 1890s oil was discovered in Los Angeles, which had already made itself a health destination for asthmatics and people with tuberculosis.  The prospect of riches from oil, gold, and oranges brought people from all walks of life to Los Angeles.  And so it was that a newspaper man from Ohio, his son-in-law, a Los Angeles-born engineer, an early star engineer in the U.S. Reclamation Service, and a journeyman from Ireland all came together to secure a source of water for Los Angeles.

Our major players here are Harrison Grey Otis, son of Ohio and a Captain in the Union Army, who became the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Mirror.  His son-in-law, Harry Chandler, who came to Los Angeles for the health of his lungs, which were in bad shape thanks to a dare involving diving into a vat of starch. Chandler gained a newspaper distribution monopoly that he put to use as head of distribution at the Times, Otis’s newspaper.  Fred Eaton came from a wealthy family that had founded Pasadena.  He was a trained engineer and head of the then-private Los Angeles City Water Company which would become the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.  He later became mayor of Los Angeles.  William Mulholland was born in Ireland, joined a merchant ship’s crew at 15.  He ultimately found his way to Los Angeles, after being a lumberjack, shopkeeper, prospector, and soldier-for-hire.  Upon arriving in Los Angeles he was drilling holes for oil wells when he decided to become an engineer and got hired as a ditch digger for Eaton’s Water Company.  Eaton took a liking to Mulholland and took him under his wing.  Mulholland eventually took Eaton’s place at the head of the Company and stayed in charge after its transition to city control earning the title of chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.  And finally, J.B. Lippincott, the Regional Engineer for the U.S. Reclamation Service, who was put in charge of the Owens Valley Project.  Mulholland’s equal in Chinatown is likely Hollis Mulwray with Cross subbing in for Fred Eaton, although the screenwriter was only inspired by the story so none of the characters are meant to perfectly represent the real people.

Back when the American West was first being settled, in the mid-1800s, it was basically a free-for-all.  The Homestead Act of 1862 carved up public land into quarter sections (160 acres, or a half-mile square) and sold them cheaply to intrepid American Pioneers who ventured west to find their fortunes.  Manifest Destiny only spurred on this effort.  Americans at the time (and maybe still) believed that God wanted them to claim all the land westward of the original colonies all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  They believed that the land would provide the basis of a New American Empire.  The only real problem (minus the fact that the land was already in use by Native Tribes and Spanish Settlers) was the lack of adequate rainfall.  The areas east of the Mississippi River get more than enough rain in an average year to grow whatever crops are suitable for the climate and the soil.  To the West of the Mississippi it is a different reality.  Most of the American West is a desert, even areas in the Plains, like Kansas, actually do not receive a lot of precipitation and farming there relies heavily on irrigation from surface waters and underground aquifers.  None of this stopped the ultra-competitive railroads from advertising the wonders and opportunities that existed right at the terminus of their rail-lines, or the politicians vying for their territories to become States.

The early settlers that grabbed the limited parcels of land with adequate water resources, and groups like the Mormons who became masters of irrigation farming, were used as the examples of the norm, not the exceptions that they truly were.  And there was the totally bizarre scientific theory of the time which promised that with more population in an area there would magically be more rain, like groups of people somehow cause clouds to form and create water out of literal thin air.  These extraordinary claims and cheap fares brought people West looking for a better future, but what they were met with was a lot of useless, arid land.  So, now the U.S. government was faced with a problem, how to get the most use out of every bit of land they had fought wars for, massacred Natives for, and bought outright from the previous colonizers.  So, using the information gathered by early land and water surveyor and explorer, John Wesley Powell, but against his reasonable advice; the U.S. Reclamation Service was formed in 1902.  The goal of the Reclamation Service was to “reclaim” land and water resources, essentially in the name of Manifest Destiny and counter to any semblance of logic and the natural order of the environment.  For example, early adopters of reclamation believed it was a waste of water to allow a river to flow into the ocean.  That clearly that water was put there to serve mankind and should be used or stored before a single drop can escape to the ocean.  The U.S. Reclamation Service still exists as the Bureau of Reclamation and is part of the Department of the Interior.  The Bureau is responsible for water projects and dams in the 17 western States.  Most notably the Reclamation Service was the agency behind the building of Hoover Dam and is still responsible for its upkeep.

It’s a real testament to American ingenuity and hubris that instead of letting the population of Los Angeles naturally disperse to better situated cities, they instead orchestrated to bring all the necessities to themselves, like modern day Roman Emperors.  Today’s Los Angeles has no water of its own.  It brings in water from 3 major water projects: 44% comes via the LA Aqueduct; 46% is contributed by the State Water Project and the Colorado River Aqueduct which are combined within the regional agency of the California Department of Water Resources.  Only 10% of LA’s water is gathered locally from storm water storage, recycling projects, and groundwater resources.  Of the three major water infrastructure projects I listed above, perhaps surprisingly, the 240 mile long LA Aqueduct which runs from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles is actually the shortest and least complicated.  The Aqueduct relies on gravity to bring the water down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and does not need pumps.  The aqueduct also provides hydroelectric power, which in the early days of Los Angeles actually powered the entire city.  For comparison, the Colorado Aqueduct, completed in 1939, is only 242 miles long, but from its beginning at Parker Dam on the Colorado River to its end in Riverside County, it is pumped 5 times and lifted more than 1000 feet in elevation to get it over the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The State Water Project, begun in 1960, starts on the Feather River (part of the Sacramento River system) in Northern California where water is stored in a series of lakes, dams, and reservoirs.  The water is then sent down river to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which empties into the North Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.  The water is diverted from the Delta into the San Joaquin Valley where it enters the California Aqueduct, which is a concrete canal that runs 304 miles before reaching California’s Central Valley.  The water then joins with the Federal Central Valley Project and is pumped several times to lift the water over 2,000 feet to lift it over the Tehachapi Mountains.  South of the Mountains the water is split into a West Branch which supplies water to Los Angeles and Ventura Counties; and an East Branch which supplies Orange County and areas south of Los Angeles as well as providing water to the San Diego Aqueduct.  This behemoth of a project consists of about 21 dams, 6 separate aqueducts that combined run for 639 miles, 18 pumping stations, and 10 powerplants with a total annual electricity generation of 6,500 Gigawatts per hour, although the project itself consumes 11,500 Gigawatts per hour annually.  There is much more that can be said about the Colorado River Aqueduct and the State Water Project, but the movie is really only concerned with the Los Angeles Aqueduct.  I just wanted to elaborate on the scale of the modern infrastructure and the fact that the other 2 sources provide water to many other players and with more consumers and less water, it becomes more obvious why the LA aqueduct has become more important than ever to the city of Los Angeles.

So how did it come to be that Mulholland and the city of Los Angeles built a 215 mile aqueduct to bring in water from an isolated valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains?  As the Chief Engineer of the LA Department of Water and Power, Mulholland had realized that it would only be a matter of time before the city would need to find another source of water.  Initially, the aquifer beneath LA had enough supply, but Mulholland and Eaton knew it would not be enough to support a growing city.  The first idea Mulholland had was to somehow divert the Colorado River to Los Angeles, but this involved infrastructure that did not exist yet, and a lot of politics with downriver states.  So instead the 2 gentlemen looked to the Owens Valley.

Owens Valley is an anomaly, nestled between the Sierra Nevadas to the West and the Inyo and White Mountains to the East, it receives all its water from runoff of rain and snow in the mountains that surround it, the Valley receives very little precipitation of its own.  Death Valley is right to the East and the Aqueduct flows through the Mojave Desert.  The Owens River starts in the Northern part of the Valley near Mono Lake and Mammoth Mountain and flows South where it used to empty into Owens Lake.  I say used to because the Aqueduct essentially diverts the entire flow of the Owens River, leaving Owens Lake dry, minus some recent mitigation watering as a result of litigation which I will explain in a bit.  The Owens Valley was first inhabited by the Paiute probably around 1000 CE.  They developed irrigation methods for farming in the valley.  The Valley was largely left alone by the Spanish and was not “settled” by Europeans until the 1830s.  In the 1860s, the Owens Valley Indian War saw the United States forcibly remove the Paiute from the Valley.  The settlers (or invaders if you will) then used the irrigation set up by the Paiute to farm and ranch in the valley.  By the 1900s the Reclamation Service sees the Owens River as an excellent place for its first water infrastructure project in California.  The Service hired Lippincott to head the Owens Valley Project (which initially has no ties with Los Angeles, it was supposed to benefit the Owens Valley).  The Service hired Lippincott despite him refusing to give up his much more lucrative salary as a private water consultant in Los Angeles.  Lippincott was also a close friend of Fred Eaton.  Now we are getting into the intrigue.

So the U.S. Government and the city of Los Angeles are both interested in the water resources of the Owens Valley, the only obstacle is the farmers and ranchers that have water rights, but who owns what rights is not public knowledge.  Lippincott hires Eaton as a consultant to the Owens Valley Project and as an agent of the Service he now had access to the land deeds and the information about water rights.  So then Eaton starts touring the Valley telling the residents he is interested in taking up cattle ranching as a hobby in his retirement.  He has inside knowledge of which landowners to target and technically does use his own money, but with the knowledge he will be repaid by Mulholland with the City’s money.  No one else knows the extent of the water Mulholland and Eaton are predicting the city will need in the future, or that Mulholland plans to store the water in an aquifer under the San Fernando Valley.  The crucial piece of information to understanding the nonsense of these actions is that California, and the other Western states, follow a system of water rights called prior appropriation.  For those of us in the, comparably, water-rich Eastern states and Canada, and much of Europe, too, this is different from the system we follow called Riparian rights.

In the Riparian system, water rights are based on the landowner’s access to the water.  If you own a farm that is adjacent to a river, you have the right to use the water in any way or amount you want so long as it does not affect the Riparian rights of other landowners further downstream.  If you own land that has water stored underneath it, with Riparian rights you have the right to access and use it, or to leave it untouched.  If that water is shared by multiple landowners then each has equal rights to the water and can reasonably use the water so long as it does not interfere with the rights of the other landowners.  In general, riparian rights holders cannot sever the water rights from the property rights.  Navigable waters, such as rivers and larger lakes, are usually open for public use and a landowner on the navigable water has no rights over the use of the water for commercial, recreational, or other public uses.

In contrast, the Prior Appropriation system of water rights is summarized as “first in time, first in right.”  With prior appropriation a person who takes or diverts water for a beneficial use is entitled to that quantity of water in the future, for so long as they continue to use the water for the same purpose.  The rights are prioritized based on the order the water was accessed.  The California case that established this system was the 1855 California Supreme Court case, Irwin v. Phillips.  Irwin and Phillips both had mining operations on the same stream; Irwin had diverted a portion of the stream for his operation before Phillips started his mine.  Phillips claimed Irwin needed to divert the stream’s water back to its original course; the Court disagreed because Irwin held the superior water rights.  A beneficial use is usually defined as agricultural, industrial, or household use.  Prior appropriation rights can be sold separately and in places where water is in short supply the water rights are often worth far more than the land.  This system of rights incentivizes their holders to take and use all the water they are entitled to every year, because if they don’t they can lose the rights.  So if it’s a dry year and the senior rights holder has to take the entirety of the water source to satisfy the entitled amount, then all the other rights holders are out of luck. Obviously, you can see how a system like this might lead to wasted resources and the possibility of monopolies over resources that are a basic human necessity.  It can also lead to ecological disasters by draining wetlands and lakes completely dry where wildlife once thrived, or causing natural vegetation to dry up and become perfect wildfire fuel because they no longer have the ground water and streams they relied on to stay alive.  Removing water from wetlands and lakes also causes other issues like soil instability and built up sediment to become airbourne, like the alkaline dust of the dry Owens Lake, or the decades of built up fertilizers and pesticides from the agricultural run-off that formed California’s Salton Sea.

What is relevant for this story is that the City of Los Angeles bought up all the senior water rights in Owens Valley while promising the residents they would only take what they needed.  Instead, LA diverted all the water they were entitled to, which was essentially the entire volume of the Owens River.  The City did not actually need all that water right away so Mulholland proposed that the excess be stored in an empty aquifer under the San Fernando Valley (which was surprising progressive because water storage at the time was in reservoirs which Mulholland hated because of the loss of water from evaporation).  While this all seems hyperbolic and unfair to the people of the Owens Valley, it was actually the only way Los Angeles could retain the entirety of the rights they had bought up thanks to prior appropriation.

Even with the water rights secured, Eaton and Mulholland still had to actually transport the water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles.  In order to build the Aqueduct they had to pass a bonding bill to secure the money for the project and at the time LA was not actually out of water, yet.  In the movie, Chinatown, Jake discovers the City has been dumping water from the reservoirs into the ocean at night in order to lower the amount of water the City had available and convince residents of the looming crisis.  An actual incident similar to this did actually occur.  Mulholland had ordered the discharge of a significant amount of water from the City’s system and was accused of doing it to secure votes on the bonding bill.  Mulholland maintained that it was just a routine maintenance procedure to clean out the pipes.  The reality of the situation was that the City was going to need that water if the population continued to grow at the projected rate.  In 1902, the population of Los Angeles was only 142,000, by 1913, when the aqueduct was completed; the city had grown to 500,000 people.  Today, Los Angeles is the second largest city in the U.S. (behind only New York City) and has a population just under 4 million people.  Even at half a million people, the aqueduct was bringing in a surplus of water, which was predicted to last several decades.

The moment that Fred Eaton sent the telegram to Los Angeles confirming he had bought the final piece of the water rights, Harrison Grey Otis, the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Mirror; signed the check that bought 16,000 acres of land in the San Fernando Valley on behalf of a group of investors that was made up of the most powerful men in Los Angeles.  The connections that Otis and the other members of the San Fernando land syndicate had in the City meant they had inside knowledge of the surplus of water that would be stored in the Valley and that with the water the previously arid and barren land would be extremely profitable.  The syndicate, as described by author Mark Reisner in his book, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water: 

[quote] …was composed of some of the most influential and wealthy men in Los Angeles.  There was Moses Sherman, a balding school administrator from Arizona who had moved to Los Angeles and become a trolley magnate – one of the most ruthless capitalists in a city that was legendary for same.  (By coincidence, Moses Sherman also sat on the board of water commissioners of Los Angeles; the syndicate could not have prayed for a better set of eyes and ears.)  Then there was Henry Huntington, Sherman’s implacable rival in the rush to monopolize the region’s transportation system.  There was Edward Harriman, the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad and a rival of both Sherman and Huntington.  There was Joseph Sartori of the Security Trust and Savings Bank, and his rival, L.C. Brand of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company.  There was Edwin T. Earl, the publisher of the Express (another LA Newspaper); William Kerckhoff, a local power company magnate; and Harry Chandler, Otis’s son-in-law, the tubercular young man with the minister’s face, the gambler’s heart, and the executioner’s soul. [end quote]  

Reisner then goes on to explain why this group of rivals and competitors had decided to join together. 

[quote] The participants, taken together, represented the power establishment of southern California with an exquisite sense of proportion.  Railroads, banking, newspapers, utilities, land development – it was a monopolists’ version of affirmative action.  Besides, William Kerckhoff was a prominent conservationist and friend of Gifford Pinchot, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, whose influence with President Theodore Roosevelt could prove invaluable.  Harriman’s railroad owned a hundred miles of right-of-way along the aqueduct path that the city would need permission to cross, and Huntington owned the building that housed the regional headquarters of the Reclamation Service!  Including Earl and Otis, the two feuding neighbours and publishers, was the master stroke.  Like a couple of convicts bound together by a ball and chain, neither could betray the other without exposing himself. [end quote]  

The syndicate’s scheme was actually revealed by an exposé in William Randolf Hearst’s newspaper, the Examiner, but the citizens of Los Angeles were just so used to scandal by then that it wasn’t a big deal.  The revelation was quickly pushed aside by Hearst himself who visited the members of the syndicate and after coming to an understanding, the Examiner came out in support of a yes vote on the bonding proposal.  The final nail in the coffin for Owens Valley came one week before the vote, when the temperature hit 101 degrees Fahrenheit with no rain in the previous 4 months.  With that the bonding bill passed, the aqueduct was built and the San Fernando syndicate became even richer than they had been before.

The movie eliminates the large amount of players involved, probably for simplicity’s sake, and even plays down the need for public support to pass the bonding bill.  The conspiracy in the movie involves Cross and his co-conspirators plan to use the names of dead people in order to systematically buy up land in the Northwest Valley which they had caused to become cheap because of a drought they artificially created.  This is essentially just a subplot in the movie, which is much weirder and ends with no resolution for any of the plot lines.  The people that talk this movie up obviously only remember the faithful film noir style and catchy one liners and have totally forgotten the “she’s not my husband’s mistress, she’s my sister, and also my daughter” bit of the story.  In real life, there was none of the strange movie conflict, and yet the real story is much more interesting.  The thing that really ties the two together is the futility of the ending.

The Aqueduct opened in 1913 to much fanfare in Los Angeles, less so in Owens Valley.  Despite the projections that the water brought by the Aqueduct would stave off a water crisis for at least a couple decades, if not more; this turned out to be incredibly optimistic.  The City managed to use more than ½ of the amount in just 10 years, mostly by wasting it on lawns, public parks with fountains and tropical gardens, and lots of pools.  Mulholland and the City started planning new water projects, including looking to the Colorado River again and a second Aqueduct to Owens Valley to drain every bit of water left.  Unsurprisingly, the people of Owens Valley had had enough, they watched as the water they used to get rich cattle ranching be used in LA like it was a novelty, not a necessity.  This outrage sparked the California Water Wars.  In 1926 about a hundred ranchers and residents of Owens Valley took control of the Aqueduct’s diversion gates by force and diverted the water back into Owens Lake.  They also blew up sections of the Aqueduct itself, but ultimately Los Angeles won as the legal owner of the water rights.  By 1941, Los Angeles had extended the Aqueduct north towards the Mono Lake Basin.  Mono Lake is a saline-alkaline lake fed by various fresh water streams but with no outlet.  It supports an immense and diverse amount of migratory birds due to the brine shrimp that thrive in the lake.  By diverting the streams around Mono Lake, Los Angeles caused the Lake’s water levels to decrease which disrupted the entire ecosystem.  Both Mono County and Inyo County (where Owens Valley is located) have been engaged in litigation with the City of Los Angeles since the 1940s and 50s up until today.  Mono Lake has mostly been able to recover due to heavy lobbying and litigation efforts by the Mono Lake Committee, the Audubon Society, and other environmental groups.  Owens Lake has been less successful, earning a minor concession that Los Angeles must keep a minimum amount of water in the Lake to prevent Alkaline dust from becoming airbourne.

Both Mono and Inyo Counties have gotten a big boost from the State Legislature since it passed the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970, or CEQA.  All projects initiated since 1970 (which includes the 2nd LA Aqueduct) are required to have an Environmental Impact Report.  A lot of the more recent litigation with Inyo County has involved the use of CEQA and the continued failure of the City of Los Angeles to adequately complete the Reports.

As for Mulholland, his Aqueduct vision was successful and he had a major road in Los Angeles named for him, Mulholland Drive.  His career came to an ignominious end with the St. Francis Dam disaster, which he personally designed and which still remains one of the worst civil engineering disasters in American history.  The catastrophic failure of the dam in 1928 resulted in the deaths of 431 people.  Mulholland was forced to retire and died 7 years later in self-imposed seclusion.  The LA Department of Water and Power continues Mulholland’s legacy by supplying approximately 163 billion gallons of water annually (from their 2021-22 report) which is about 447 million gallons of water a day.  The Department’s annual budget (which for 2024 was $2.26 billion dollars) is entirely funded by water and power bills paid by consumers, and not by local taxes.  For comparison the entire budget of the City of Los Angeles for 2024 was $13.15 billion, $1.86 billion of which is allocated to the Police Department.  As for the legal costs related to the Owens Valley claims, according to a LA Times about the litigation from 2013, the Department claimed that ratepayers in Los Angeles had already paid $1.2 billion for mitigation on Owens Lake and addition measures could add $400 million to that cost.  It seems to me that the Department just keeps piling on that cost by filing the amount of lawsuits that it has to try to reduce their responsibility for the massive air pollution crisis they directly caused by extracting all the water out of the Owens Valley.  All the litigation fees are ultimately paid by the ratepayers and citizens of the City of Los Angeles.

If all of this has seemed completely insane and probably a massive waste of money, then I offer you the immortal line from the movie: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”   

When deciding where to build a city, maybe consider the future needs of its citizens.