Hagekhalil — an engineer who became the district’s general manager in 2021 — is tasked with finding a way to keep the taps flowing, even as climate change is walloping all these supplies at once. His vision is to make Met less dependent on these wildly swinging systems by combining more local storage, water recycling and conservation.

He’s optimistic to a fault: One source described him as a “Hallmark card,” and on the sidelines of a major conference for Colorado River water users this week, he was handing out pins with his mantra “One Water” to frenemies at California’s largest agricultural customer on the river, the Imperial Irrigation District.

He spoke to POLITICO recently about getting creative to adapt to climate change, the financial challenges brought by conservation and two of the most engineered and controversial water systems in the West: the Delta Conveyance Project and the Colorado River.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The short-term deal on the Colorado River struck this spring was successful partly because California’s water users remained united around their proposal. But Met hasn’t always been on the same page as other big water players in the state, especially IID. Tell me about how you’re approaching these negotiations now.

To me, California is united. We’re all together. Compared to where we were last year, with other states, I think California has done its job.

We need to start thinking about how we deal with this from a lens of abundance, where we’re actually investing together in projects, whether it’s in Mexico, whether it’s in Southern California, in Arizona, whether it’s working with the tribes to recycle water, to reuse it. I’m pushing to find new ways that can make us sustainable and resilient. The future can’t be just all about cuts.

What is the status of negotiations?

I’m optimistic that we have some positive movement in the right direction. Time is not on our side, and everybody agrees that we need to do something collaboratively. We’ve committed as part of the lower basin that we will deal with the structural deficit in the lower basin, but the question is beyond the structural deficit, as the hydrology and system goes down, how we’re going to share.

This past year really highlighted how climate change is bringing wild extremes to California’s water systems. Met is at the epicenter of this. Big picture, what needs to be done to make sure you have water for customers in a wildly variable future?

Really, it’s about getting water when we have it and actually banking it and storing it for drier times. … We’re doing this climate adaptation master planning effort underway in Metropolitan, which I think is going to lead the way in creating all this resilience that’s anchored in conservation with local water supply.

We need to get to a place where the river, the community, the people that depend on us, look back and say you guys, around this time, did something good for us, as [William] Mulholland did for our community in Southern California, by bringing water. It’s not gonna be the same as he did. It’s not going to be his pipelines bringing water from the river. It’s going to be us conserving, recycling, reusing, conserving, storing. I call it the virtual aqueduct. I say I’m building the fourth virtual aqueduct, and it’s about all these things coming together.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration recently released the final environmental review for the Delta conveyance project, which would send more water your way from Northern California. How does this project fit into your vision? Will Met fund its construction?

I applaud the governor and the administration for looking at different ways of supporting us on recycled water, supporting storage, investing a lot of resources in water resiliency, but to me I think this project has to be part of an integrated water plan for the entire state of California — and more, for the Southwest — because every water drop that we can capture during high flows and move away and bank it and store it, it’s going to help us deal with the conditions when we don’t have water. We saw what happened the last few years, and we should not be fighting over water during dry conditions.

My board is excited about having the discussion through this climate adaptation master plan because it has to be seen as part of a holistic solution and not just a single purpose project. … What is the cost benefit to Metropolitan? What’s the reliability of that water? And what’s the benefit to us and to the environment and to the communities around the Delta?

You’ve pushed for conservation, including by sponsoring legislation to ban decorative lawns, and you’ve been successful — which means less revenue for you. How will you pay for all these projects you’ve mentioned, including to reduce use on the Colorado River?

The majority of the funding for Metropolitan comes from selling water, and the shift that we’re seeing is yes, we’re incentivizing folks not to buy our water, which is great news. But as the amount of water we sell goes down — and this year is going to be the lowest we’ve seen — that loss in revenue will have an impact on the amount of money we have available for investments. So part of the climate adaptation is also financial resilience in a business model.

My idea is, can we find ways to collaborate and come up with reservoirs of money that we all can pay, all of us from California to Arizona, Nevada, and all the way up to the other states, in some kind of equitable share, and then we can pool the money, leverage the money and then strategically find ways we can invest it that can benefit us to reduce our demand on the river so we can store water.