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 was the first jurisdiction with a water allocation committee and was a champion of new water storage solutions with rainy season water diversion from the Carmel River into the Seaside Aquifer.
Legal strategies and inadequate storage projects are, however, nowhere near enough to get by the SWRCB’s order 95-10 to reduce the community’s draw from the Carmel River.
Proposed Solutions:
Continue with asserting our maximum legal rights to existing water sources (i.e. the Carmel River and the Seaside aquifer).
Strongly champion 1 regional water management plan rather the 3 currently being floated. A plan with full community support (i.e. Peninsula wide) is the only way to a new long term water source that actually gets implemented.
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.
Paid for by Felix For Seaside City Council