In November 2002, California voters approved a $3.4 billion bond measure to fund a variety of water-related projects. Nearly five years later, the first of that Proposition 50 money is about to finally start trickling into local communities, $25 million of it headed for Ventura County.

The money will fund projects to remove invasive weeds along Calleguas Creek and retire obsolete septic systems that are contaminating groundwater beneath the Oxnard Plain. It will help finance several water-recycling projects and reduce contamination of local streams. Next week, the Board of Supervisors will be asked to accept the $25 million grant from the state on behalf of the coalition of agencies responsible for developing and prioritizing the project list.

Proposition 50 was unusual in a number of ways. For one thing, it was the product of citizen initiative rather than the legislative process, the route more typically followed by water bonds. But it was also historically atypical in the way it blended money for water projects with money for habitat conservation.

The 12 legislative water bond measures approved by voters during the 1960s, '70s and '80s focused exclusively on building things: dams, canals, sewage treatment and reclamation plants, purification facilities, pipelines, pumping stations. None explicitly allocated a single dollar to ecological programs. That began to change in 1996 with Proposition 204, which allocated more than $500 million to ecological restoration, and fish and wildlife programs primarily associated with the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta system. And in 2000, California voters approved Proposition 13, a $1.97 billion bond measure that provided $250 million for Delta fish and wildlife programs, and $468 million for watershed restoration and protection elsewhere in the state. Proposition 50 continued that novel trend.

There's one more aspect of Proposition 50 that made it unusual. It included $500 million for projects developed in accordance with regional watershed plans. Ideally, those projects were to address a variety of goals simultaneously, from increasing the water supply to reducing flooding and improving recreation.

Regional, watershed-based planning is something people in the water-development community have been talking about for years as a worthy ideal. But for a number of reasons, it has proved fiendishly difficult to accomplish.

Traditionally, individual water agencies have addressed only the narrow concerns of their customers, and have focused on quantity and quality of supply.

Flood-protection agencies have focused on levees, dams and storm channels, even when those structures compromised groundwater quality and wildlife habitat. Natural watercourses have typically been regarded as either delivery pipelines or floodwater conveyances, not as fragile ecological systems. And when it came to vying for state and federal funds, agencies competed with each other in a messy fiscal free-for-all.

Agencies in Ventura County have historically been a little better at cooperation than their counterparts elsewhere in the state. In fact, a group of key stakeholders in the large area drained by Calleguas Creek — 341 square miles encompassing the most heavily populated part of the county — have been developing and refining a management plan for that watershed since 1996.

But Proposition 50 required even more. Beginning in 2002, shortly before voters approved the water bond, local agencies developed similar management plans for the Ventura and Santa Clara river watersheds. Those were merged last year with the Calleguas plan to create a single integrated approach to water management under the auspices of the Watersheds Coalition of Ventura County, which has more than 60 participating agencies and organizations.

On behalf of the coalition, the county then applied for a share of the bond money. In January, the state announced its approval of a grant to help fund 11 of Ventura County's top-priority projects. Without a solid plan, and a robust countywide coalition to advance it, that money would have gone elsewhere.

The convoluted process behind the grant award on next week's board agenda is less inherently interesting than the actual projects the money will make possible. But in this context, process assumes vital importance. Water is the ultimate unifying force: It is the connective tissue that links upstream and downstream communities, makes the concerns of fish and frogs the same as those of farmers and suburban families, unites mountaintop scrub and seaside marsh. Without a similarly integrated approach to planning and management, water projects may cause more problems over the long term than they solve.

— John Krist is a senior editor and Opinion page columnist for the Star. To read previous columns, visit www.johnkrist.com. His e-mail address is jkrist@VenturaCountyStar.com.