IID sets path forward on EDP and coordinator options
EL CENTRO — On Monday the Imperial Irrigation District took the first step toward developing a new plan to allocate its most valuable resource.
President of the Board of Directors Jim Hanks directed staff to begin to look into crafting a replacement for the equitable distribution plan, which was repealed last month following a court decision.
The EPD was a system to cap the amount of water farmers within the IID’s service area could use per acre of land. The program was put in place as a measure to resolve overruns the district had incurred and sought to remediate that by establishing a hybrid method to set allocations that took into account both historical usage and total water available for agricultural use.
The repeal of the EDP followed a writ of mandate made by Imperial County Superior Court Judge L. Brooks Anderholt in August. The IID submitted an appeal a month after the decision was made in hopes of keeping the plan in place until the matter got resolved in the appellate court.
During the meeting on Feb. 20, IID outside counsel Charles DuMars suggested the board engage in negotiations with the plaintiff Michael Abatti with the intent of rescinding both appeals, formulating a new plan and vacating the decision made by Judge Anderholt.
“I want to reiterate that we are in negotiations on this matter,” Hanks said. “Failing to reach a settlement, we will move forward on a two-track course. One is the development of EDP based on historical data, and the second track is to pursue the appeal.”
The board voted 3-0 in favor of moving forward with Hanks’s suggestion. Division 2 Director Bruce Kuhn has abstained of all matters pertaining to the Abatti litigation while Division 1 Director Juanita Salas was not present.
Reliability coordinator
Two weeks ago in its meeting in La Quinta, the board locked to a 2-2 vote regarding the steps to take in determining which agency will be tasked to be the district’s reliability coordinator in the future.
A reliability coordinator has the highest level of authority for the reliable operation of the bulk electric system in a region. Its primary role is to prevent and to mitigate emergency operating situations and to safely restore power after an outage.
Currently, IID has an agreement with Peak Reliability, which covers a large portion of balancing authorities across the western United States.
Peak Reliability currently is planning to add an organized market to its structure through an alliance with PJM Connext, which is an affiliate of an eastern regional transmission organization.
As a response, multiple entities, including CAISO, have expressed intent to withdraw from their current agreements with Peak Reliability. In the case of CAISO, it intends to become reliability coordinator for its own balancing authority and others.
Staff recommended four actions to the board, which included submitting a revocable letter of intent to Peak Reliability to retain its services and concurrently do the same with CAISO and Southwest Power Pool in order to reserve their place in the queue and to give staff additional time to explore options and bring a formal proposal to the board.
The matter previously was brought to the board during the March 6 meeting in La Quinta, but the vote ended in a 2-2 deadlock. During the previous meeting both Hanks and Kuhn expressed reservations against initiating any sort of negotiations with CAISO due to the ongoing litigation and an opposing stance on the grid regionalization proposal.
However, since that meeting, IID and CAISO have reached a settlement regarding their legal dispute, which began in the summer of 2015. This gave the board enough peace of mind to move forward with staff’s recommendation.
Staff will have to come back to the board before finalizing any agreement with any of the three agencies. General Manager Kevin Kelley reassured the board that initiating the process with CAISO doesn’t bind IID to that particular course.
“I’ve assured the board that we continue to uphold an opposed position to expanding the CAISO footprint across multiple states,” Kelley said. “The IID remains adamantly opposed, but you can do all these things at once.”
The board voted 3-1 in favor of the proposal with Hanks being the sole vote against.