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ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT - Leading a large public agency with a diverse, highly skilled workforce is not a walk in the park. Good executives expect some friction. When it arises, responsible boards of government agencies must have a process for reviewing any disagreement or assertion of impropriety. What no board or board chair should do is overreact to an allegation and treat an agency director as guilty until proven innocent, suspending them without due process.
Unless your name is Adán Ortega, chair of the board of the Metropolitan Water District (MWD).
In June, Ortega sparked concern and condemnation from environmentalists, labor and tribal advocates, and some women’s rights and local Democratic leaders for acting hastily and with unclear motives to suspend the respected MWD general manager Adel Hagekhalil during a special meeting of the board.
Ortega’s own required disclosures show private consulting contracts he has with several water companies with interests that overlap with MWD. On May 28, as board chair, Ortega received a letter from a disgruntled MWD staff member who was an underling of Hagekhalil and who accused the general manager and several other colleagues of leaving her out of their “inner circle.”
Ortega then made a very curious decision. He waited more than two weeks, until after a regularly scheduled meeting of the MWD board on Tuesday, June 11, to call a special meeting of the board just 48 hours later, on Thursday morning, June 13, with the stated purpose of punishing Hagekhalil.
Why did the board chair wait until the agency’s general manager was on a plane overseas to a work-related conference, leaving him unable to respond? And why did Ortega neglect due process and a dispassionate review of the allegation and instead use the special meeting to rush to judgment and suspend the general manager based on an unsubstantiated accusation?
One possible answer floats to the surface from those paid consulting contracts on water policy that Ortega maintains.
Over the past several years, Ortega has emerged as a leading promoter of a far-fetched water pumping scheme aggressively pushed by a Los Angeles-based company called Cadiz.
Ortega receives $5,000 per month as a consultant for the Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD), the foremost local agency partner with Cadiz to get water the company is trying to sell, pump, and pipe out from beneath the Mojave Desert.
Metropolitan Water District board member Adán Ortega filed an official statement in federal court in 2021 in favor of Cadiz and against Native American tribes and environmental advocates, who were denied a voice on permits granted by the Trump Administration to pump out water from the sensitive, sacred areas in the Mojave Desert. In 2022, a federal judge rejected Ortega’s argument in support of the pipeline scheme and threw out the permits improperly granted to Cadiz.
Metropolitan Water District board chair Adán Ortega receives $5,000 per month as a consultant for the Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD), the foremost partner with Cadiz to get water the company is trying to sell, pump, and pipe out from beneath the Mojave Desert.
The publicly traded company seeks to drain large accumulations of ground water, amassed naturally over thousands of years. These desert aquifers feed natural springs that are sacred to sovereign tribal nations and essential to species that roam the arid habitat, including bighorn sheep, kit foxes, and desert tortoises.
Cadiz alternately disregards and disputes evidence that its greedy depletion of the groundwater would destroy the desert ecosystem, indigenous communities rooted in it, and livelihoods and economic vitality tied to it.
Nearly the entirety of the environmental movement in California opposes Cadiz and has for 30 years. In July 2019, that enormous coalition of environmental, small-business, and good-government groups earned a landmark victory with the passage of the Desert Protection Act, SB 307, which imposed a stringent, science-based, multi-year review process against destruction of the aquifers, a serious barrier to Cadiz’ pipe dreams and corporate profits.
More recently, Dolores Huerta, the champion of workers and women’s rights, has denounced Cadiz for deceit and environmental destruction. Huerta directed particular ire at Groundswell, a front group that Cadiz paid to cleverly wrap its corporate agenda in deceptive trappings of diversity and environmental sensibility. She all but called Cadiz swindlers.
Who doesn’t oppose Cadiz? Adán Ortega, the board chair of MWD, the largest water agency in Southern California, stretching from San Diego to Los Angeles County. It’s not coincidental that MWD controls an aqueduct to the Colorado River that Cadiz is eyeing as an important conveyance for water and on which its corporate business plan and profit motives depend.
Nor is it coincidental that Ortega took center stage in a promotional event at MWD in April 2023 for Groundswell, the group Cadiz funded to shill for its scheme with water decision-makers and state legislators.
How much in the tank for Cadiz is Ortega? In 2021, Ortega, a Fullerton resident, had just narrowly gained appointment by city officials in San Fernando as their appointee to the MWD board. In one of his first major acts as a new board member, Ortega filed an official statement in federal court in 2022 in favor of Cadiz and against Native American tribes and environmental advocates, who were denied a voice on permits granted to Cadiz by the Trump Administration. Notably, Trump’s Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, had previously been a partner in the law firm hired by Cadiz for lobbying.
Later in 2022, a federal judge rejected Ortega’s argument in support of the pipeline scheme and threw out the permits as improperly granted to Cadiz.
Even the lobbying campaign to stop the pivotal pro-environmental law signed by Governor Newsom in July 2019 bears Ortega’s fingerprints. In addition to Ortega’s recent $5,000-per-month client Santa Margarita Water District, two other clients who pay Ortega fought that bill, and lost: Twentynine Palms Water District and California Association of Mutual Water Companies.
Was Ortega’s hurried, sloppy maneuver to cast aside due process and good-governance practices and to suspend general manager Adel Hagekhakil driven in part by efforts to expedite Cadiz?
Were the progressive water-policy goals that Hagekhakil was implementing and the trust that he was building with public-sector unions, environmental groups and long-ignored stakeholders, including tribes, so threatening that Ortega felt pressure to ambush the general manager when an opportunity presented?
Was that pressure, compounded by Ortega’s conflicts of interest with his private clients, so great that it outstripped any concern for the adverse legal exposure and liability that MWD might incur due to his hasty action?
As chair of the board of MWD, Adán Ortega has put himself on the wrong side of the environmental justice movement. On the wrong side of indigenous people and tribal nations. On the wrong side of a law championed by Gov. Newsom. And on the wrong side of the Biden Administration in court.
All of this describes exactly where the environmentally destructive Cadiz company is situated. Based on the money he is paid and the actions he is taking, Ortega is clearly not in alignment with the people of Los Angeles or the rest of California. An accurate GPS location for the chair of the board of the Metropolitan Water District is in the pocket of Cadiz.
(Hans Johnson is a longtime leader for LGBTQ+ human rights, environmental justice, and public education. His columns appear in national news outlets including USA Today and in top daily news outlets of more than 20 states. A resident of Eagle Rock, he is also president of East Area Progressive Democrats (EAPD), the largest grassroots Democratic club in California, with more than 1,100 members. This article expresses the opinions of Hans Johnson and not those of CityWatchLA).
Top photo: Metropolitan Water District board chair Adán Ortega (center) joins Cadiz corporate board member Carolyn Webb de Macías (right), now chief of staff to L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, in applauding longtime promoter of the Cadiz water-pumping scheme Antonio Villaraigosa at an event advocating for Cadiz and other discredited water projects in March 2023.
