Items of interest include a presentation by the County Water Authority on its lawsuit against the Metropolitan Water District, a proposal to adopt a resolution declaring an end to drought level 1 restrictions but keeping in place other permanent water use restrictions. The board will also consider spending funds on a customer satisfaction survey.
The Otay Water District has filed a lawsuit against the city of San Diego challenging the amount the city charges Otay for reclaimed water. The suit, filed May 30 in San Diego Superior Court, claims that there has been a breach of contract by San Diego and excess charges of more than $16 million to Otay since the beginning of 2016. San Diego more than doubled its reclaimed water rate in November 2015, from $350 per acre feet to $753 per acre feet. One acre foot is about 326,000 gallons.
California is emerging from one of the worst droughts in its modern history, a dry spell that prompted emergency regulations and some deep reflections on the fragile nature of our water supplies. The recent rain and snow across much of the state seem to have given water agencies breathing room to think long and hard about one oft-floated solution that came up a lot during the drought: desalination.
June 4, 2017 (San Diego’s East County) – The Otay Water District filed a lawsuit in Superior Court on May 30th against the City of San Diego alleging breach of contract, overcharges on recycled water rates and lack of transparency. The suit accuses San Diego of becoming “unjustly enriched at Otay’s expense,” according to Mark Robak, president of the Otay Water District, and asks the court to rescind a January 2016 rate hike and repay that money to the district.
California’s powerful regional water districts are working alongside Gov. Jerry Brown to take on more responsibility for designing, building and arranging financing for a $15.7-billion twin-tunnel project that would ship water southward from Northern California as they push to finally close the deal on the controversial plan, two officials working closely on the project told the Associated Press.
San Diego County Water Authority directors have met behind closed doors more than three times a week on average since the start of the year, putting the agency on pace to surpass last year’s tally of gatherings that critics say could run afoul of open-meetings laws. U-T Watchdog reviewed payroll records — the only documentation available for the meetings — and found that directors appointed to the 36-member board were paid to attend 55 private meetings through the end of April. That’s 10 more than were held over the same time period in 2016 — a year in which board members held more than 100 meetings out of public view.
California’s Superintendent of schools, Tom Torlakson, visited schools in San Diego Thursday to talk about water quality issues and to congratulate a couple of teachers of the year. NBC 7 Investigates uncovered lead contamination in drinking water at some local schools, and now the topic is top of mind for many. NBC 7’s Liberty Zabala reports.
The long debate over Poseidon Water’s proposed ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach continued this week as the California State Lands Commission released a draft of a supplemental environmental impact report analyzing planned additions to the facility that are meant to reduce potential harm to marine life and increase the plant’s efficiency. The supplement to a 2010 EIR addresses the possible environmental effects of a screen and diffuser added to the intake and outflow pipes, respectively, that would be used by the $1-billion desalination facility proposed at Newland Street and Pacific Coast Highway.
Southern California Edison’s plan to store 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station has citizen activist Ray Lutz on edge. “It’s only 100 feet from the seawall to the edge of where the deposit is,” Lutz said. The permit from the California Coastal Commission for the storage is for 20 years. But Lutz contends that the permit is practically permanent because there’s no long-term nuclear waste storage site in the United States. “They don’t know if it will be removed in 2051 or even for many decades after that,” Lutz said.
Solana Beach is on its way to becoming the first jurisdiction in San Diego to move toward an energy alternative to SDG&E, striving for the promise of cheaper electricity rates, greater local control and a higher percentage of renewable energy. In a historic 4-1 vote on Wednesday, May 24, the Solana Beach City Council launched into the exploratory phase of a three-phase plan to shift Solana Beach’s 7,800 energy customers out of SDG&E’s monopoly and into city-run community choice aggregation (CCA).
