California’s new water law tested
Wells would go beneath, affect nearby community
Throughout California, access to and distribution of water is a perennial issue. Water conflicts are often nuanced and take on a life of their own. In some cases, a local conflict can have statewide implications — Marina, a small city on Monterey Bay, finds itself in such a conflict.
In 2009, the California State Water Resources Control Board ordered California American Water, a private, for-profit corporation, to end its illegal water diversions from the Carmel River. In its search for alternate water sources, Cal Am now has focused on a proposal to install seven slant wells in Marina to supply a desalination plant, which would extract large amounts of water from an aquifer within the Salinas Valley Groundwater Basin and export it to serve Cal Am customers.
The City of Marina is not served by Cal Am and, as a result, no one in the Marina community will receive water from this proposed project. Instead, Marina’s community values, including sustainability of its affordable drinking water source and its valuable beach and coastal dune ecosystem, would bear the brunt of adverse impacts from the slant wells’ construction and operation, their associated aboveground infrastructure, and access roads.
Specifically, Cal Am’s slant wells would draw in brackish and fresh groundwater — not seawater. This groundwater is located in one of the state’s 21 critically over-drafted basins that have been identified as a priority for protection under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act passed in 2014. Therein lies the conflict:
Will this new law have the force needed to protect the aquifer from continued overpumping, or does it allow approvals for new projects without any existing water rights to export water out of the basin?
How will the state intercede if an entity takes water without following the groundwater laws and causes more overdraft in an already critically over-drafted aquifer?
Will the state allow water resources to be managed by large private corporations at the expense and exploitation of small cities or communities?
This will be an important test of of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act’s effectiveness in ensuring intelligent, local water policy and planning decisions.
Cal Am should focus on non-desalination options that are available and affordable — these would satisfy their customers’ water demand for the next decade and cease overdrafting from the Carmel River. This would allow time to plan and develop a truly regional desalination plant, one that is publicly owned and includes willing partners from Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act requires formation of local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, thus moving decisions on local water use to the local level, including oversight of critically over-drafted basins. In priority areas like Marina, these agencies are required to develop a Groundwater Sustainability Plan by 2020.
Yet, Cal Am’s proposal to extract many million gallons per day from this aquifer could prevent the local sustainability plan from working as intended to achieve a safe and sustainable groundwater yield. To the contrary, Cal Am’s proposed project would ignore the act’s environmental protections, deplete scarce water resources, and facilitate further seawater intrusion into local aquifers.
Marina objects to the environmental injustice of siting yet another regional industrial facility (Marina is already home to the regional landfill, sewage treatment plant and beach sand mine) in our ethnically diverse, working-class city, only to extract water for Cal Am-served communities of Monterey, Carmel, Pebble Beach and others — but not Marina.
From a state policy perspective, the proposed project would set a horrible precedent on multiple levels.
Could for-profit corporations without water rights take water from a neighboring jurisdiction because it claims a greater need?
Can a non-local water purveyor be allowed to undermine groundwater sustainability agencies and their efforts to comply with groundwater sustainability laws by illegally taking these precious resources?
We understand that the greater Monterey Peninsula region must get water from somewhere besides the Carmel River, although not in the greatly inflated amounts that Cal Am seeks. The City of Marina is a willing partner in pursuit of solutions that won’t jeopardize an already overdrafted groundwater basin and won’t cause undue harm to Marina or its beautiful coastline.
Cal Am’s proposal for its project to desalinate brackish groundwater (rather than seawater) is enormous and unrealistic. Realistic demand projections prove alternate solutions are viable. Alternative solutions include Cal Am accepting potable water offerings from another local water agency that has legal rights to local water, and pursuing an expansion of the “Pure Water Monterey” recycled water project that is already under construction. These alternatives would be much more affordable and sustainable.
Will the state stay true to its stated policies of local control, protecting coastlines from industrial development, and promoting better management of scarce groundwater? Cal Am’s proposal is now going through the review and approval process before the California Public Utilities Commission, which is the lead oversight agency on this project.
This review is not just about the siting of a desalination plant. This is a significant water conflict that will test the durability of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act — setting either a good or bad precedent that surely will inform future water decisions statewide, for better or worse.