The dwindling water supply may be the most critical issue Seaside (and the Monterey Peninsula) has ever faced.  Indeed, one water attorney (Russell McGlothlin) representing the City before the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) has stated that the Monterey Peninsula has “the most serious water problems of any area in California.”

To the City Council and City Employees’ credit, the City has been at the forefront of the water “fight” and has often been proactive.  Indeed, the City of Seaside was the first Peninsula jurisdiction with a water allocation committee.

Furthermore, when I was chair of the Planning Commission in the late 1990s, we championed a new water “recovery” and storage solution with rainy season water diversion from the Carmel River into the Seaside Aquifer [aka Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR)].  The project which followed from the tests my commission approved has returned more than 3000 acre feet of water over 12 years.  The project is the only new water source for the Monterey Peninsula in decades.  Due to the tremendous success of this project it will soon be expanded with a second phase.  Together the two ASR projects will yield over 5000 acre feet in a “wet” year.  [More information here.]

Legal strategies and inadequate (to date) storage projects are, however, not near enough to get by the SWRCB’s order 95-10 to reduce the community’s draw from the Carmel River.

To this end, the City has participated in the formation of a regional water project, a multi-jurisdictional, public and private effort.  Unfortunately, political considerations and weak leadership has led to a project in which our water rates will at least double and possibly triple.  Meanwhile, there is “narrow” public ownership of the water project and a private entity and its shareholders will almost certainly get quite rich off the “public’s dime.”

Monterey County Weekly has a good series of articles here and my friend Jim Toy has a great blog entry describing the multi-jurisdictional confusion.

Proposed Solutions:

1. Continue with asserting our maximum legal rights to existing water sources (i.e. the Carmel River and the Seaside aquifer).

2. Strongly champion a regional water management plan with full community support (i.e. Peninsula wide) including significant public ownership not only of the means of production but also (at least) main line distribution and storage.  This affects the entire Monterey Peninsula, therefore a strong effort should be made that people of  the Peninsula publicly own significant portions of the system. This is the only way to ensure a new long term water source that actually gets implemented with long term ability to control operating costs.  Indeed, amortized over 30 years it seems the cost of public ownership would be equal or less than the projected increase in rates -- and you and I would own the system for our own productive use!

My STPG colleague Ron Weitzman, Naval Postgraduate School professor and local activist wrote an interesting guest editorial for the Monterey County Herald (2010-7-31) leading to many of the same conclusions.  Another, even more compelling Herald letter (“Buying Cal Am will never be cheaper”) written by Ron was published on September 21

3. Add private, project-level water reclamation into the Municipal Code.*  All roof and pavement runoff (i.e. rain) should be captured on new home and commercial construction.  Additionally, remodels (and cumulative remodeling projects over maybe 15 years) that cost more than a certain percentage of the existing developed property (maybe 35% value and above — these are just a preliminary suggestions) should be similarly compelled in order to secure permits.

[* The municipal code does finally require runoff to be reclaimed and to be injected back into the aquifer, but I am suggesting a further step.  See below. ]

Under this plan, runoff water would be captured into cisterns on each property and used for landscaping irrigation.  This water then still percolates into the aquifer, but we would have the additional benefit of watering landscapes without drawing potable water from the community’s stressed sources (i.e. aquifer and river).

Organized on a community wide scale, affected projects would be able to buy cisterns and related systems at a significant discount.  It is likely this new code would only add about one percentage point to each project’s cost and would actually add significantly more to each project’s value.

If a similar policy had been in place since I first started talking about this idea as a planning commissioner in 1995 it is expected over 1500 homes and commercial structures would have been affected by now, likely yielding well over 60 acre feet of “new” water per year which would be enough water to supply over 240 new households.

Such an addition to the code would put Seaside at the very forefront of water management in the entire State and would give Seaside tremendous negotiating leverage in all regional water management discussions for being extremely proactive with protecting and augmenting its water supply.

 

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