R.I.P. Kelly Rowe: water board director stood out from the herd
Rowe championed OCWD's wastewater recycling project but lampooned its 'foolish' $1.4 billion ocean desalination project
The day of his untimely death on Nov. 22, 2023, Kelly Rowe of the Orange County Water District’s Board of Directors was obtusely mourned by his colleagues in an official press release.
OCWD manages the groundwater basin that holds 66 million acre-feet of water and provides 85 percent of the drinking water (15% comes from imported water) for 2.5 million residents in north Orange County.
To OCWD watchers it’s no surprise that some of his former colleagues omitted from his obituary one of the best parts of his time on the board—helping to stop their pet boondoggle, Poseidon Water’s infamous and now deceased ocean desalination project.
Needless to say, managing the public’s water supply is a huge responsibility, placed in the hands of a ten-member board of elected and appointed politicians who are carefully trained to tow the party line.
But Rowe was an independent thinker who represented the ratepayers of OCWD’s District 7, which includes Costa Mesa and surrounding areas, exceptionally well.
He first served on the board from 1998 to 2,000. After a long sabbatical ending in 2018, he defeated two-term incumbent Shawn Dewane by a landslide vote. In 2022 he was re-elected for his final term in office.
Rowe was motivated to seek office again by his strong desire to end the board’s obsession with Poseidon Water’s proposed $1.4 billion ocean desalination project, which he called “one of the largest water and land frauds in California’s history.”
The passage or rejection of the Poseidon project by the California Coastal Commission would help decide if California’s coast would be littered with huge energy-guzzling and unneeded ocean desalination plants that kill marine life, discourage conservation and cost too much.
Rowe thought it was vital to OCWD’s mission to steer its valuable time and resources away from Poseidon toward creating sound water reliability projects.
For that, he was shunned by Poseidon and its coterie on the OCWD board, including Cathy Green, Shawn Dewane, Steven Sheldon and Denis Bilodeau.
Possible Brown Act violation: Scott Maloni, VP for Poseidon Water, watches over a presentation by his OCWD coterie, including OCWD directors Vincent Sarmiento, Cathy Green, Steve Sheldon, Jordan Brandman, Dina Nguyen and Denis Bilodeau. When Director Kelly Rowe attempts to join them at the podium, Maloni tells him, according to Rowe, “You’re not going to speak on my time.”
Qualifications
Rowe was as non-political as a water buffalo can be, but his experience as a geologist and his courage to challenge the herd when it was acting “stupid” (his favorite Poseidon adjective) made him stand out.
He was a licensed professional geologist, certified engineer-geologist, hydrologist and floodplain manager with 40 years of experience in the field, as noted in his OCWD obituary.
He managed the Irvine sub-basin in 1985 and from 1996 to 1998 oversaw major repairs to injection wells that protect the basin from seawater intrusion and contamination.
Board president Cathy Green called his passing “a tremendous loss not only to OCWD but to all of Orange County,” noting that his “wisdom, passion and unwavering commitment to Orange County water issues was unmatched.”
It’s hard to think of a sweeter homage paid by one water buffalo to another, but it’s ironic because Rowe was often a thorn in Green’s side.
From 2013 to 2022 OCWD pitched hard to build Poseidon’s dream project along the shore of southeast Huntington Beach—on an earthquake fault, next to a toxic waste dump, in an area scientists say will be prone to future floods from rising sea-level caused by climate change.
Green was Poseidon’s most enthusiastic and loyal advocate. Rowe was one of its it’s most outspoken opponents among SoCal water buffalos.
Green worked relentlessly with other Poseidon coterie members—by hook or crook—to push Poseidon’s desal dream forward, despite fierce opposition from OCWD ratepayers and environmentalists statewide.
Besides using his bully pulpit to oppose Poseidon, Rowe joined forces with R4RD (Residents for Responsible Desalination), a local citizens group formed in 2005 to stop the project.
Rejected false equivalencies
Rowe rejected Green’s oft made attempts to validate the Poseidon project by comparing it to OCWD’s world-renowned Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS), voted for by Rowe and other directors long before she was on the board.
The GWRS started operating in 2008 and recently completed its final expansion. It turns wastewater into 130,000 acre-feet of drinking water annually—nearly 3x what Poseidon would have produced and at a third of its estimated cost.
Green claims that initially there was public opposition to GWRS as well. Speaking at a regulatory hearing in 2019, Rowe addressed that claim head on.
“I note that we did not have any public opposition,” he told the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. “Although Poseidon proponents say that we did have opposition, I get really angry when I hear that.”
Proposed a different plan
Overpumping the Orange County groundwater basin dissolves the seawater intrusion barrier, leading to contamination of its water supply and limiting its production capacity.
In order to maximize water sales during a severe drought, OCWD directors routinely overpumped the basin, taking out up to 390,000 acre-feet, ignoring official policy that required conservation and increased water imports starting at the 300,000/AF level (which the board changed to 350k/AF in an apparent feel-good move).
Imported water prices rose along with the supply deficit. OCWD’s reluctance to raise replenishment rates for its 19 member agencies hurt the agency’s ability to purchase the needed imported water.
Meanwhile, Green and her cohorts used OCWD’s water “shortage” to justify the need for Poseidon’s desalinated water, which would have only partially replenished the basin but at more than three times the price of water imported from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD)—causing a significant increase in the replenishment assessment fee charged member agencies.
But Rowe thought that the Poseidon project was a foolish idea. “I think it is an understatement to describe the Poseidon project as incredibly stupid,” he told the Regional Water Quality Control Board in 2019.
Instead, he wanted OCWD to build a “long overdue” 14-miles-long upgrade of its seawater intrusion barrier so that it could safely withdraw up to 3 million AF from the basin instead of only 350k/AF.
That would ensure water reliability for 10 years without replenishment and “would delay by decades the need for any ocean water desalination plant,” he said. Besides, there were plenty of cheaper alternatives to the Poseidon project.
Rowe also believed that there was the potential for significant underground water storage in south Orange County, which currently lives mostly off of imported water.
If we ever need ocean desalination, he believed, “OCWD could surely build and operate such a facility much cheaper than the proposed Poseidon project.”
Poseidon’s end
After 20 years of lobbying efforts, Poseidon and its OCWD coterie failed.
The scandal-ridden project was defeated by a unanimous vote of the California Coastal Commission on May 12, 2022—much to the delight of Rowe, who considered the defeat to be an historical occasion.
After a bitter defeat, OCWD scrubbed its huge ocean desalination presentation and any mention of Poseidon from its website.
Naturally, president Cathy Green omitted Rowe’s OCWD-based raison d'etre from his official obituary, but mentioned his love of Disneyland.
If Rowe reads that in the afterlife I’m sure he will have a good laugh and move on.
Legacy
Poseidon’s defeat after decades wiggling around environmental regulations and sound water-management practices means that large ocean desalination projects won’t be littering California’s coast anytime soon.
Rowe’s position of the ideological spectrum probably puts him comfortably between water-conservationists and water-management nihilists.
“Kelly Rowe was an engineer’s engineer, but he had a mission to maximize groundwater usage,” says Conner Everts, director of the SoCal Watershed Alliance and a long-time Poseidon opponent.
Everts met Rowe when he resigned from his first stint as OCWD director to become an educator.
“When he came back to the board he was always available to talk and called it as he saw it,” he recalls. “Kelly called out corruption on the board and had no love lost for Poseidon.”
Everts spoke with Rowe at an MWD meeting the week before he died. “He felt he was [finally] being understood on the potential for groundwater in the south county, but he left too soon.”
Full disclosure: I was elected as R4RD’s founding president and served for 6 months.
Kelly was great! I got him to come with me to a Santa Ana Council meeting a couple years ago, to try to get them to pass a resolution against Poseidon, and to instruct their OCWD rep (Nelida Mendoza) to vote against it. We both thought the public comments would come up near the beginning, but the Council went on with stupid ceremonial things for nearly two hours and eventually Kelly had to go home.
First Phil Bacerra gave a recognition to a local business, that wasn't so bad or long. Then Nelida had some huge ceremony for, I think, her grandma, who had turned 100 or something, and we had to sit through all kinds of family films and lots of laughter and tears. Then it was Johnathan Hernandez' turn (and Johnathan is my friend.) And he'd decided this would be a good time to honor some band he liked a lot, which went on forever, I guess a band made up of Native Americans. At some point the whole Council and audience had to join in on singing "Hooked on a Feeling" (the Oo-ga-cha-ca song.)
Kelly had to leave and I had to be the only Poseidon commenter. When he left he said "This is sure a self-indulgent Council," and I couldn't disagree.
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