MWD CEO faces severe criticism for hasty suspension of Director General due to alleged conflict of interest

ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT – Leading a large public agency with a diverse, highly qualified workforce is no picnic. Good leaders expect friction. When friction occurs, responsible boards of government agencies must have a process in place to review disagreements or allegations of impropriety. No board or CEO should overreact to an allegation, treat an agency leader as guilty until proven innocent and suspend him without due process.

Unless your name is Adán Ortega, CEO of the Metropolitan Water District (MWD).

In June, Ortega sparked concern and criticism from environmentalists, labor and tribal representatives, as well as some women’s rights advocates and local democratic leaders, for his hasty and unclear-motive suspension of respected MWD Director General Adel Hagekhalil during a special board meeting.

Ortega’s own disclosure requirements show that he has private consulting contracts with several water companies whose interests overlap with MWD’s. On May 28, as board chairman, Ortega received a letter from a disgruntled MWD employee, a subordinate of Hagekhalil, who accused the director general and several other colleagues of excluding them from their “inner circle.”

Ortega then made a very strange decision. He waited more than two weeks, after a regular MWD board meeting on Tuesday, June 11, to call a special board meeting just 48 hours later, on Thursday morning, June 13, with the stated goal of punishing Hagekhalil.

Why did the board chairman wait until the agency’s director general was on a plane to a working conference abroad and then be unable to respond? And why did Ortega neglect due process and an objective examination of the allegation and instead use the special session to rush to judgment and suspend the director general on an unproven allegation?

One possible answer comes from the paid consulting contracts on water policy that Ortega maintains.

In recent years, Ortega has become a leading promoter of a far-fetched water pumping project being aggressively pursued by a Los Angeles-based company called Cadiz.

Ortega is paid $5,000 a month as a consultant to the Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD), Cadiz’s main local partner agency in the extraction of water that the company plans to sell, pump and pipe out of 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 environmentalists who were denied a say in the permits issued by the Trump administration to pump water from sensitive, sacred lands in the Mojave Desert. In 2022, a federal judge rejected Ortega’s argument in support of the pipeline project and overturned the permits wrongly granted to Cadiz.

The publicly traded company is seeking to drain large pools of groundwater that have accumulated naturally over millennia. These desert aquifers feed natural springs that are sacred to sovereign tribal nations and vital to species that live in this arid habitat, including bighorn sheep, kit foxes and desert tortoises.

Cádiz alternately ignores or denies evidence that the voracious exploitation of groundwater would destroy the desert ecosystem, the indigenous communities rooted in it, and the livelihoods and economic vitality that come with them.

Nearly the entire environmental movement in California has opposed Cadiz for 30 years. In July 2019, this massive coalition of environmental, small business, and government groups won a landmark victory with the passage of the Desert Protection Act (SB 307). The law mandates a rigorous, science-based, multi-year review process against the destruction of the aquifers that seriously hamper Cadiz’s fantasies and corporate profits.

Recently, labor and women’s rights champion Dolores Huerta accused Cadiz of fraud and environmental destruction. Huerta directed her ire in particular at Groundswell, a front organization that paid Cadiz to cleverly cloak its corporate agenda in deceptive facades of diversity and environmental awareness. She effectively labeled Cadiz a fraud.

Who isn’t against Cadiz? Adán Ortega, CEO of MWD, the largest water utility in Southern California, stretching from San Diego to Los Angeles County. It’s no coincidence that MWD controls an aqueduct to the Colorado River, which Cadiz considers a vital water conduit and on which its business plan and profit intentions are based.

It is also no coincidence that in April 2023, Ortega was the center of attention at a promotional event at the MWD for Groundswell, the Cadiz-funded group that promoted its program to water policy makers and state lawmakers.

How much is Ortega committed to Cadiz? In 2021, Ortega, a Fullerton resident, had narrowly been nominated by city officials in San Fernando as their nominee for 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 environmentalists whom the Trump administration denied a say in Cadiz’s permits. Notably, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt had previously been a partner in the law firm hired by Cadiz to lobby.

Later in 2022, a federal judge rejected Ortega’s arguments in support of the pipeline project and threw out the permits, saying they were wrongfully granted to Cadiz.

Even the lobbying campaign to stop the crucial green bill that Governor Newsom signed in July 2019 bears Ortega’s signature. In addition to Ortega’s most recent client, the Santa Margarita Water District, which pays $5,000 a month, two other clients who pay Ortega fought against that bill and lost: the Twentynine Palms Water District and the California Association of Mutual Water Companies.

Was Ortega’s hasty, sloppy maneuver to ignore due process and good governance practices and suspend Director General Adel Hagekhakil due in part to efforts to speed up work in Cadiz?

Were the progressive goals of the water policies that Hagekhakil implemented and the trust he built among public sector unions, environmental groups and long-ignored stakeholders – including tribes – so threatening that Ortega felt pressured to ambush the director general at the opportunity?

Was this pressure, compounded by Ortega’s conflicts of interest with his private clients, so great that it overshadowed any concerns about the legal consequences and liability that MWD might incur by acting hastily?

As MWD board chair, Adán Ortega has put himself on the wrong side of the environmental justice movement. On the wrong side of indigenous peoples and tribal nations. On the wrong side of a law supported by Governor Newsom. And on the wrong side of the Biden administration in court.

All of this describes exactly where the polluting company from Cadiz is based. Based on his salary and his actions, Ortega is clearly not on the side of the people of Los Angeles or the rest of California. An exact GPS location of the CEO of the Metropolitan Water District is in Cadiz’s pocket.

(Hans Johnson has long been a leader in LGBTQ+ human rights, environmental justice, and public education. His columns appear in national news outlets such as USA Today and in major daily newspapers in more than 20 states. He lives in Eagle Rock and is also president of the 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.)