The Monterey County Local Agency Formation Commission voted 5-2 Wednesday to finalize its denial of the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District’s planned takeover of California American Water.
The 5-2 LAFCO vote followed its initial vote Dec. 6 to dismiss the water district’s application for the buyout, an acquisition mandated by a 2018 ballot measure.
Monterey County is the only county is California with a law that prohibits private companies from operating new desalination plants. That law, passed in 1989, will be up for a potential repeal when the county’s supervisors meet on Sept. 21.
The law has been thrust into the spotlight as Algonquin Power and Utilities Corp., a publicly traded, $11 billion Canada-based company, has proposed construction of what could be a massive regional desalination plant in Moss Landing.
State and county leaders recently took a tour of Nacimiento and San Antonio dams to get a first-hand look of the impacts of drought and facility conditions.
Both reservoirs have reached near record lows, with Nacimiento at 14% capacity and San Antonio at 7%. Water releases from the reservoirs have ceased as of July 28, with the visible effects in the north county being a drying of the Salinas River.
Though the 7% at San Antonio amounts to 50,000 acre-feet of water, it can’t be released.
Monterey One Water officials on Monday moved closer to its goal of providing additional water for the Monterey Peninsula when it unanimously approved a key environmental report for its expansion project. The 10 members of the board of Monterey One Water all voted to approve an environmental document called a supplemental environmental impact report, or SEIR, that advances closer to the expansion of its regional treatment plant. Monterey One is the sewer treatment provider in northern Monterey County that has invested in proven technology that can purify wastewater to the degree it becomes drinkable. It is then reintroduced into local groundwater.
The Central Coast and parts south are unusually dry, according to the University of Nebraska – Lincoln’s national drought monitor. That could lead to dry soil, increased irrigation, stunted germination of dryland crops and increased risk of fire, the report says.
Amid mounting controversy and concerns over environmental justice, California American Water on Wednesday withdrew its application for a desalination project in the small Monterey Bay town of Marina.
The proposal had become one of the most fraught issues to come before the California Coastal Commission, which was set to vote Thursday. The decision would have been the first major test of the commission’s new power to review not only harm to the environment when making decisions but also harm to underrepresented communities.
To a large extent, the fate of several multi-million dollar water projects on the Monterey Peninsula is in the hands of the California Coastal Commission. The question is whether the commission will grant a development permit for a desalination plant proposed by California American Water—or will the commission deny the permit and implicitly endorse a smaller project that would provide new water to the area by expanding the regional wastewater recycling facility. A vote is expected at the August 12-14 meeting of the commission.
Why would a public agency support an unnecessary and risky billion-dollar desalination plant and let a private utility profit hundreds of millions of dollars at the public’s expense? Here’s the story.
Eight years after the regional desalination project fell apart, the legal battle over its unraveling appears to be nearing a conclusion.
A proposed settlement has been reached among the parties involved including California American Water, Monterey County and the county Water Resources Agency, Marina Coast Water District, and RMC Water and Environment regarding the failed desal project. It was presented on Monday in the San Francisco Superior Court overseeing the long-running lawsuit.
On par with mission architecture or cattle ranching is another consequential relic of Spanish colonialism in California: the idea that water pumped from underground belongs to whoever owns the land above.
In the Central Valley, a major danger of unregulated pumping has been a drooping of the surface at a rate of one foot a year. Here, in the Salinas Valley, so much freshwater has been extracted that, in some aquifers, the natural flow from continent to ocean has reversed – seawater is pushing through gravel and sand into groundwater sources, threatening to spoil a critical household and agricultural supply.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
