When Adel Hagekhalil speaks about the future of water in Southern California, he often starts by mentioning the three conduits the region depends on to bring water from hundreds of miles away: the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct.
As general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Hagekhalil is responsible for ensuring water for 19 million people, leading the nation's largest wholesale supplier of drinking water.
He took the job in 2021 after a bitter debate among board members, some of whom said they saw him as too inexperienced in Western state water politics. After the board narrowly voted to hire him, Hagekhalil sought to emphasize unity, and began wearing a blue lapel pin with the slogan"We Are One.""I'm a believer in branding," Hagekhalil said."And I believe that I probably am pretty good at doing it.
His openness to listening is a welcome change and a sign that he is trying to take the agency in a new direction, said Charming Evelyn, who chairs the Sierra Club's water committee in Southern California. She said she sees him as a"people pleaser," who knows what each camp wants to hear and is careful not to antagonize anyone while trying to strike a balance.
On a recent morning, Hagekhalil met with workers at the Robert B. Diemer Water Treatment Plant in Yorba Linda, where he spoke about the importance of workplace safety and the changes he is prioritizing. He talked about the climate adaptation plan the district is preparing to become more resilient and more self-reliant on local sources.
In a series of meetings with managers, Hagekhalil discussed a project in the Antelope Valley that will store water underground, efforts to work with partner agencies to bank water elsewhere, and the district's plans to rework its system to provide redundancy in areas that now rely solely on imported water from Northern California via the State Water Project.
Hagekhalil said he expects the share of water that Southern California gets from imported sources, now about 50%, to shrink in the coming decades to roughly 30%. He said that will be driven by expected long-term declines in available supplies from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a gap that will need to be filled with other supplies.
"I don't want people ever to be in a place where they do not have water," Hagekhalil said."This cannot happen here." When the family fled to an underground shelter, Hagekhalil carried his grandmother, who was ill. He also carried two suitcases and remembers stepping past dead bodies as he fled. "To me, I'm the top surgeon now," he said with a chuckle."So it starts from my dream of being a doctor, to now probably being a water doctor."
"We can't put all our eggs in that one basket. In the past, everyone was focused on the delta as the solution for our future," he said."We need to diversify. We need to look at other options."
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