$3 billion to be considered for water import proposals
NORTH SHORE — As a result of the Aug. 31 meeting between local officials and Gov. Jerry Brown, it was announced on Saturday morning that the state is preparing to take a closer look at water import projects to be considered as part of a long-term fix for the Salton Sea.
During a public meeting organized by the office of Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, California Natural Resources Agency’s (CNRA) assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy, Bruce Wilcox, said that in the recent meeting with Brown, the governor authorized the CNRA to seek requests for proposal regarding the water import to start looking at the feasibility of the potential projects.
In recent years, state and local officials have been given presentations about different proposals for them to support, but without engineering and design specifications and with proposed costs ranging from $300 million up to $3 billion. Now, the state has decided to put some of these ideas to the test and evaluate proposals to find out whether importing water from the Sea of Cortez or from another source is actually feasible to accomplish.
“It is designed for people to respond and give us information so we can evaluate their project and see what, if any, make sense. There is such a differential in costs and other issues, such as dealing with the salinity, that we need to get those (proposals) in common ground so we can evaluate them.” Wilcox said.
The RFP is expected to go out prior to the end of the year and once those proposals come in, the state will analyze the merit and viability of each.
Garcia said during the event that Sen. Ben Hueso and himself discussed the possibility of importing water to the sea due to increasing private interest and managed to convince Brown to move forward with the request for proposals.
“The governor told us ‘you’ve been hearing about the viability of the project? OK, let’s look at the engineering documents, some preliminary environmental impacts and if it’s a go, we may fund something like that.’” Garcia said.
The goal of asking for requests is to allow state officials to look at the merits of each proposal to make an evaluation and assessment to determine if importing water is the best long-term solution. At this time, the state is not committing itself yet to support any of these proposals.
“I’m hopeful that we’ll get a lot of responses and that we’ll find something in there that will work for us,” Wilcox said.
Water import proposals, also called sea-tosea, have been brought forward recently. In September of 2015, a delegation of county officials along with former Imperial Irrigation District board member Matt Dessert traveled to Mexicali to get a glimpse of a proposal made at the time to move water from the Sea of Cortez through the Coyote Canal south of Mexicali into the Laguna Salada and build canals from there to the Salton Sea.
One year later, another group presented a similar concept to the state and Imperial County. Later on, Wilcox traveled to Mexico to get a better understanding of the logistics of the project.
During the meeting at the North Shore Yacht Club, which was filled beyond capacity on Saturday morning, a few of the members of the audience, most of whom live in the vicinity of the Salton Sea, asked Garcia, Wilcox and others to seriously consider importing water as they feel it is the only viable solution to stabilize the shoreline of the receding lake.
Officials are hoping that once they compile the proposed projects, they can begin to evaluate the good and feasible concepts in each one. Wilcox said the state may opt to do a combination of ideas from some of the proposals. The CNRA is expected to have an analysis of the proposals submitted in the first half of 2018.
In March, the state released a 10-year management plan, whose goal is to cover nearly 30,000 acres of exposed lakebed in the next decade, that plan has a cost of $383 million.
Although the state, as of now, has only allocated $80.5 million toward those projects, last week in the final hours of this year’s legislative session, both the Assembly and Senate narrowly approved Senate Bill 5, a $4 billion park bond which includes $200 million for the Salton Sea. The bill is expected to be signed by the governor and would then be placed on the June ballot, which will allow California voters to make the final decision.