Poseidon Town: OC Water District Backs Big-Ag Ballot Initiative that Helps Big Desal
OCWD denies that 'More Water Now' proposition would bypass environmental protection laws and fund its desalination dream
For 10 years the Orange County Water District (OCWD), which manages the county’s groundwater basin, has obsessed over creating a public/private business partnership with Poseidon Water to free itself from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET).
OCWD buys untreated water from the MET for about $800 an acre-foot and uses it to refill the basin, which supplies 2.5 million north-county residents with 75 percent of their water.
Poseidon wants to build a $1.4 billion ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach and sell OCWD 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated water a year. That would replace an equal amount of OCWD’s imported MET water (enabling a $400 million grant from MET to help Poseidon) at 3-4 times the price, for 30-50 years, regardless of need.
A 2018 study by the Municipal Water District of Orange County, MET’s conduit for water sales to OCWD, put the Poseidon project last on its list of needed water-reliability projects.
OCWD never studied “need” for the project, but it wants a desalination plant in its back yard regardless.
“It’s very unique for a private company to come in and do what they’ve done,” John Kennedy, OCWD’s chief engineer, told me in a 2018 interview.
“Some people say, ‘Let’s wait. It’s too early for its time and we don’t need it yet. Let’s wait 10 or 15 years,’” Kennedy said. “[But] who knows what the [environmental] laws will be in 10 or 15 years. So, you can make an argument that if you don’t do it now you may never get the chance again.”
Axing Environmental Laws
Twenty years after Poseidon came to Orange County it still doesn’t have a final contract with anyone other than lobbyists and push pollsters due to lack of final permits and the high cost.
But on Oct. 6 OCWD’s directors saw an opportunity to push their partnership with Poseidon forward by endorsing a ballot initiative (More Water Now) created by San Joaquin Valley’s agriculture oligarchs.
Ignoring climate change and the groundwater mismanagement that has parched the San Joaquin Valley basin, More Water Now promises to fix the state’s water problems by quickly funding and building big water projects.
If the initiative gets on the Nov. 2022 ballot and passes, Poseidon could probably stop worrying about environmental laws and start building.
More Water Now would create the Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022 (WIFA) to amend the California Constitution and the Public Resources Code.
WIFA would bypass the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the Coastal Act to quickly approve and fund “drought resiliency” projects selected by members of the State Water Commission appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom (a Poseidon fan) and his successors.
Limit Conservation and Build Big with Taxpayers’ Money
OCWD’s board president Stephen Sheldon is a former Poseidon consultant and an early member of the More Water Now team. He believes that Proposition 1, passed in 2014 to fund $7 billion in big water projects, has moved too slowly.
“We haven’t seen a project constructed from that,” he told the board. “And I think that there’s a real need to support large projects and funding to keep our state having the water supply that it needs for many reasons.”
Most of the designated projects under WIFA will be dams and off-stream reservoirs, water conveyance (canals, pipelines, and tunnels), waste-water recycling and ocean desalination plants.
The money would come from 2 percent of the State’s general fund yearly until those projects provide 5 million acre-feet of new water supply yearly. That’s $2.5-$4 billion a year and possibly more than $100 billion in the next “few decades,” according to the legislative analyst.
The initiative restricts conservation to 1 million acre-feet of water-savings despite studies showing that conservation alone would surpass the 5 million acre-feet goal at far less cost to the environment and taxpayers.
Denials
OCWD General manager Mike Markus denied that WIFA would bypass environmental laws, while admitting that it would.
“It streamlines the CEQA process…,” Markus said, at the Oct 6 board meeting. “It does not bypass the Coastal Commission.”
“There again,” he added, “there is a time frame by which the Coastal Commission would have to act and then the approval would actually be from the Secretary of Natural Water Resources (sic).” (emphasis added).
Then Sheldon said that WIFA wouldn’t affect Poseidon because it’s desal project will go to the Coastal Commission this spring and WIFA won’t be active until 2023.
In fact, WIFA will be retroactive to Sept., 2021.
The last time Poseidon went to the Coastal Commission for its “final” permit was in 2013, but it was ordered to go back and study the feasibility of subsurface desalination, which is less damaging to the environment.
If Poseidon is denied again, under WIFA, the Secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, a Newsom cabinet appointee, will make a final decision that cannot include further environmental review—and that will be the end of CEQA and the Coastal Act as far as Poseidon is concerned.
