A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
March 19, 2007
2. Supply
PIPELINE PROJECT:
Traffic, water may flow in tunnel; Drilling project ongoing in Santa Ana Mountains - San Diego Union-Tribune
WATER TRANSFER:
County-Imperial water transfer dispute heads to arbitration - North County Times
DESALINATION:
Showdown on desal ordinance; Monterey County: Debate expected on private vs. public ownership - Monterey Herald
WATER AGREEMENT SIGNED:
New water line agreement goes with the flow - San Gabriel Valley Tribune
AG WATER NEEDS:
Column: Increased demand, unreliable supply; Taste for California almonds grows with farmers' quest for water - Sacramento
PIPELINE PROJECT:
Traffic, water may flow in tunnel; Drilling project ongoing in Santa Ana Mountains
By Gordon Smith, Copley news service
Amid the peaks that separate
Their goal is to find out what kind of rock lies along the path of a proposed Metropolitan Water District pipeline under the
The pipeline would deliver up to 646 million gallons of water daily, enough to supply 1.46 million people annually.
The drilling is also of interest to the Riverside County Transportation Commission, which – along with transportation officials from
The freeway that provides the shortest access between the counties, state Route 91, is one of
Supporters of an underground transportation link between
The highway tunnels would cost an estimated $5.8 billion. Fees from utilities, phone companies and other potential users are seen as crucial to helping cover construction costs.
Lake Elsinore Mayor Bob Magee, a board member of the Riverside County Transportation Commission, said the commission plans to conduct test drilling this year. Kleinfelder will supervise that drilling work under a $6 million contract.
“We are a little bit behind” Metropolitan's drilling project, Magee said. “But we are interested in what they're doing and hope we can share information.”
Metropolitan's effort is costing about $2 million. Project manager Paul Guptill, an engineering geologist for Kleinfelder, said two holes are being drilled, one 2,300 feet deep and one 2,500 feet deep.
“It's quite unusual,” Guptill said. “There aren't many places where we really have to drill that deep” for geological tests.
The water tunnel would have to be deep enough so that the pipeline could angle down gradually from
For the project, Kleinfelder is drawing geologists from several of its offices around
The drilling site is a small clearing in the chaparral at an elevation of 3,300 feet, with nearby peaks reaching 4,000 to 5,000 feet.
Below and to the west lies the former Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, and beyond it the cities of
Visitors and Metropolitan officials reach the test site via a jouncing, hour-long drive up a steep, twisting dirt road, followed by a 1.5-mile hike along trails strewn with loose rock. The drilling equipment was carried part of the way by truck and then lifted to the site by helicopter. Rock samples are flown out by helicopter.
To save time, geologists and drilling crew members fly to and from the site, working 10-hour days when weather permits.
As a diamond-covered drill bit ground its way to a depth of 300 feet recently, Kami Deputy, a field geologist for Kleinfelder, said working there was “pretty cool.”
Storm clouds moving in off the ocean provide a spectacular sight, Deputy said. Coyote tracks abound, and one of her co-workers caught a glimpse of a bobcat. Lunch is often a can of soup heated on the diesel engine that powers the drill.
John Shamma, a Metropolitan senior engineer who is helping to coordinate the project, said a goal of the drilling “is to find out how strong the rock is down there, and what it will take to (excavate) it.”
The strength of the rock – some of it 200 million years old – will be calculated by compressing the core samples between two hydraulically driven metal plates until the stone breaks, Shamma said. Other tests will determine how abrasive the rock is.
Geologists also will try to determine how much groundwater is in the mountains, and at what depth. That will determine how much water pressure the boring machines would have to contend with as they chew a 16-foot-wide, 11-mile-long tunnel through the bedrock, Shamma said.
Such factors will dictate how fast the machines could bore and thus how much the tunnel would cost, Shamma said.
Shamma said the path of the new water pipeline may have to be deeper than the proposed freeway tunnels – a potential setback for the transportation project as well as thousands of
The three transportation tunnels each would be 45 feet in diameter and would be 10 to 12 miles long. Two of the tunnels would carry one-way car traffic, and the third would be a two-way route for trucks.
In comparison, the world's longest vehicular tunnel is in
Both proposals for tunnels in the
“There are lots of tunnels in the past that have functioned like drains,” said Guptill, the Kleinfelder geologist.
He believes that such problems can be addressed with proper engineering.
Earthquakes represent another potential obstacle. The Elsinore fault, which runs along the eastern side of the
Tony Rahimian, a consultant for the Riverside County Transportation Commission, said the agency is well aware of potential earthquake hazards but believes they would be minimal because the
“A tunnel is the safest place to be if there's an earthquake, as long as you're not crossing a fault,” Rahimian said. “When the ground moves, the entire tunnel moves with it.”
In addition, shock waves from a temblor are most pronounced at the Earth's surface, and are moderated deeper underground, where the tunnels would be located, Rahimian said.
The transportation tunnels are only one of two alternatives to state Route 91 that are being studied, and “are at the very infant stage,” Rahimian said.
Once the Riverside County Transportation Commission conducts its drilling tests, preliminary environmental and engineering tests would begin, he said.
“If everything stays on schedule, and is found feasible, the tunnel would be constructed by 2023,” Rahimian said.
Shamma insisted that the tunnel for Metropolitan's water pipeline would be safe during an earthquake and was designed not to cross the
It could be many years before it's built, too.
“But (population) growth is encroaching on both sides of the mountains, so the sooner you identify an alignment, the better,” said Metropolitan spokesman Bob Muir.
“The history of water in
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20070319-9999-1n19drilling.html
WATER TRANSFER:
County-Imperial water transfer dispute heads to arbitration
By Gig Conaughton, staff writer
For more than two years, Imperial Valley water officials have argued that
At the same time, San Diego County Water Authority officials, pointing to an economic study conducted in December 2004 that stated otherwise, have said that the deal has actually been a financial boon to the valley.
Now, after two years of private haggling over it, the argument is headed for arbitration in April, where a panel of judges will issue a ruling on whether the 2004 economic study was valid. The ruling will be binding.
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Dan Hentschke, the Water Authority's top lawyer, said if the ruling goes the Water Authority's way,
No one knows how the arbitration will turn out.
But the continuing dispute shows that the water transfer remains a sore spot in
"It's extremely controversial here," irrigation district board member John Pierre Menvielle ---- who considers himself a supporter of the deal ---- said last week. "There will not be any more water transfers out of
Encinitas Mayor James Bond, a longtime Water Authority board member, said the Water Authority tried in vain over the last couple of years to reach a settlement by offering different financial packages but that irrigation district leaders could never sell the plans to the valley. One of the packages included a plan to invigorate the dairy-farming industry in
"This thing got stuck and the only thing left for us is to go to arbitration and take our chances," Bond said.
The long-festering dispute revolves around the water-transfer deal's most controversial aspect: fallowing, which is the need to take farmland in the relatively poor
Deal opens tap to valley
The Water Authority-Irrigation District water transfer was signed in October 2003 after more than eight years of on-again, off-again negotiations, and was itself part of a larger deal between
Because the transfer is a signed contract, the current dispute would not affect the water agreement.
Under the terms of the deal, Imperial Valley farmers are scheduled to sell
The actual delivery of water is scheduled to ramp up slowly to its peak over 19 years. In 2003,
In return, the Water Authority has paid the irrigation district a total of $27.64 million, and an additional $25.65 million to Southern California's main water supplier, the Metropolitan Water District, to use its pipelines to ship the water to
By 2020, the deal will deliver 200,000 acre-feet a year to county residents, making up 22 percent of the county's total water supply ---- more than 1 out of every 5 glasses of water.
For
Residents disagree with study
Recognizing that taking farmland out of production could cause economic damage in
In 2005, an irrigation district official predicted the socioeconomic harm could approach $170 million ---- a figure to be tacked onto the water transfer's cost.
But in 2004, an independent panel of three economists delivered what
The transfer hurt some individuals, but overall, it had offset that damage and created $1.1 million of economic improvement, according to the study.
Angry irrigation district officials said the study favored the Water Authority and took too broad a measurement ---- including items such as housing starts, new construction and retail sales ---- instead of simply measuring the hurt experienced by direct "third-parties" such as farmworkers and agricultural supply companies.
Hentschke said the arbitration process was scheduled to start April 23, expected to last for 10 days, and would be decided by two retired federal judges and a retired state Superior Court judge.
He said the decision would be binding, meaning both sides would have no right to challenge it.
Sides to sit for arbitration
During the arbitration hearing, Hentschke said, the judges would basically decide whether the controversial study was too broad or correctly took the valley's economic pulse.
"The Water Authority believes that the economist panel got it right," Hentschke said.
Menvielle disagreed.
"Well, of course (they agree with the study)," he said. "They don't want to give us any money. They want the water, and they don't think there are any impacts."
Menvielle said
But Bond said that even though farm service companies had suffered because of fallowing,
"It's booming down there (
One longtime Water Authority board member from North County, Greg Quist of Escondido's Rincon Del Diablo Water District, said the Water Authority negotiated its water transfer deal poorly ---- and that it and ratepayers now stood to "reap the whirlwind" in higher costs.
"They're trying to get as much as they can out of us," Quist said of
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/03/18/news/top_stories/21_13_533_17_07.txt
DESALINATION:
Showdown on desal ordinance;
By Kevin Howe and Jim Johnson, staff writers
The Board of Supervisors has scheduled a hearing on the possible amendment of a county ordinance that may block California American Water's plans for a pilot desalination plant in Moss Landing.
The board plans to consider whether it should instruct its staff to rewrite a 1989 ordinance that requires desalination plants to be publicly owned.
That legislation -- the first such ordinance in the state -- came in response to improvements in water desalination technology, fears of a diminishing water supply and a flurry of proposals for desalination plants to serve particular development projects and, in one case, a private homeowner.
Then-county environmental health director Walter Wong argued against such private plants, noting at the time the ordinance was adopted that saltwater conversion produces a brine discharge that is "between sewage and hazardous waste." He said the disposal of that by-product should be regulated.
Wong also argued that a desalination plant failure would require the plant to be hooked up to the existing water supply, and therefore if a desalination plant is constructed, it should be turned over to a public agency.
A plea by Salinas land use attorney Brian Finegan on behalf of clients David and Vera Mayne for a permit to hook up a desalination plant for their Yankee Point home, which was not served by a water system, failed to sway the supervisors from amending the ordinance to allow individual home treatment plants.
In a June 2005 interview, Wong said he found there was no public agency in the state that regulated desalination plants. He talked with numerous state and regional agencies, identified potential environmental problems and determined to write an ordinance that would guide such projects in
At the same time, Wong said, there had been problems in the state with private companies abandoning rundown sewer and water systems, leaving customers in the lurch and forcing local governments to determine solutions. The Regional Water Quality Control Board had begun requiring public ownership of sewer systems because of it.
To avoid similar situations, he said, the county's ordinance required public ownership for desalination, "so you have a mechanism, in case of failure, to raise the money to fix it."
He said the ordinance also called for a backup system, and Cal Am agreed to be the backup water purveyor on the
"When I wrote this ordinance, I did talk to Cal Am... and they had no problems with it," Wong said.
Permit approved
Last August the supervisors approved a permit for Cal Am's pilot seawater desalination plant at Moss Landing, ratifying an earlier approval by the county zoning administrator. Cal Am ultimately proposes a full-scale plant to provide water throughout its service area.
In December, the state Coastal Commission overrode the recommendations of its own staff against it and approved a coastal development permit for the experimental desalination plant.
The next month, George Riley and Manuel Fierro, advocates of publicly owned water services organized as Friends of Locally Owned Water (FLOW), filed suit in Monterey County Superior Court seeking to overturn those permits, contending that the plant's authorization is at odds with the 1989 county law that requires public ownership of water desalination facilities.
Their attorney, Robert Rosenthal, said the supervisors are trying to correct their mistake in issuing the permit in the first place "under the guise that (the ordinance) is ambiguous.''
"What's really happening here is that they issued a permit to Cal Am and didn't have authority to do it," Rosenthal said.
The ordinance, he said, "is very clear that only public agencies can be issued permits for desalination plants."
If they think its language is ambiguous, Rosenthal said, then they failed to look at the minutes of the 1989 meeting when it was enacted.
That year, he said, Cal Am was pumping water out of the
Wong said the ordinance was passed in response to the drought in the late 1980s. Development was at a standstill due to the scarcity of water, and developers and cities were looking to desalination for a solution.
The county enacted the desalination law as a public health and safety measure, Rosenthal said, as is its right under state law.
"It's spelled very clearly that it be owned, operated and managed by a public agency."
Now, he said, the supervisors feel they have to "figure out how to retrench and issue a permit in violation of their own ordinance."
Intentions
Wong said there was no ambiguity to his or the supervisors' intentions when the ordinance was passed.
"The fear is always with a private company, if they let (the system) go, run it down and walk away with bankruptcy, that someone is left paying for it," Wong said. "So I put that in when I drafted the desal ordinance."
The supervisors propose to ask the county's legal staff to bring them amendments to the desalination ordinance that would change the public entity requirement to a requirement that owners and operators possess the technical, managerial and financial capability to operate such a plant; clarify the technical, managerial, and financial criteria, and clarify the regulatory scope of the ordinance.
That, Rosenthal said, would allow any agency, public or private, to build and operate a desalination plant. "It's a political move. It doesn't pass the sniff test."
He noted a decision in January by the 2nd District of the U.S. Court of Appeal that ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cannot allow power plants to kill fish through their cooling water intakes.
Proposed plant
Cal Am's proposed pilot plant, Rosenthal said, would use Moss Landing Power Plant's cooling water intake and outfall system as its water source. "That (court) holding is enforceable here, and is such that Cal Am's location of the pilot plant is one that can't be used."
The water company, Rosenthal said, "doesn't have a location, doesn't deserve favored treatment, it offers no benefit to the public and the pilot plant cost has to be borne by the users of Cal Am water."
Cal Am spokeswoman Catherine Bowie said of the supervisors' and commissioners' actions that "we feel the permits we were issued by the county and the Coastal Commission for the pilot plant were properly done."
"We went through a full public process, and our opinion is that this ordinance on public ownership does not apply to our pilot project."
Marc Del Piero, general counsel for the Pajaro-Sunny Mesa Community Services District, which has its own plans for a desalination plant in Moss Landing, commented that "(The ordinance amendments) won't affect us at all. We've been trying to comply with the law as opposed to doing something else."
"We want to make sure whoever operates desal plants has the technical expertise to do so. We're not as interested in the public-private aspect of this issue."
Stroh said he understood the original intent of the ordinance was to "make sure technical expertise" was in place for any desal operator, regardless of whether it was a public or private operator and said County Counsel Charles McKee describes the ordinance language as "ambiguous" and that the definition of "public entity" is not clearly spelled out.
Cal Am is under the gun to find a new water source for its
In 1995, the state Water Resources Control Board advised Cal Am that it was taking 14,106 acre-feet per year from the
In addition, a court has ordered that producers of water from the
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/16933694.htm
WATER AGREEMENT SIGNED:
New water line agreement goes with the flow
San Gabriel Valley
By Lafayette
On March 5, Pomona Mayor Norma Torres, Ed Hilden of the Walnut Valley Water District and Anthony Lima of the Rowland Water District ceremoniously put their John Hancocks on a copy of a document that renewed the 50-year-old Pomona-Walnut-Rowland Joint Water Line agreement.
"The line paid off for 50 years and it's going to pay off for 50 more," said
The actual document was signed Dec. 21 and allows for three optional 10-year extensions.
The about seven-mile line runs from the Metropolitan Water District Weymouth Treatment Plant in La Verne before it branches to the communities it serves. The
The Pomona-Walnut-Rowland Joint Water Line Commission was formed in May, 1956 and construction began in October of that year.
The agencies shared in the construction costs by way of three voter-approved bond measures in the respective communities. The $1.8 million line was completed in June, 1957.
John Galleano, 87, now a
"There were a lot of problems to get together," Galleano remembered. "Which roads to put it on, (etc.)"
At the time, Rowland had fewer than 250 water customers.
"It was a farming community," Galleano said.
Today, the Rowland Water District has about 13,500 connections, while Walnut Valley Water District has about 26,200 in Walnut, Diamond Bar,
The capacity of the line is 141 cubic feet per second of water. Physically, the line ranges between 50 and 60 inches in width. To date, about 9.5 billion gallons have passed through it.
"We take the largest slice of that,"
Without the water line, things would be pretty dry.
"It would be devastating," said Ken Deck, general manager of the Rowland Water District. "Rowland and Walnut are 100 percent import water. The (ground) water is so brackish. I don't know how the farmers and ranchers drank that stuff. It tastes just like sulphur."
The new water line agreement outlines specifics related to operation, maintenance, structure of the commission, administration and repairs, said Erik Hitchman, administrative officer to the joint board.
"We're looking forward to many many years of continued ongoing operations," he said. #
http://www.sgvtribune.com/search/ci_5437835
AG WATER NEEDS:
Column: Increased demand, unreliable supply; Taste for California
Sacramento
By Tom Philp, Bee columnist
Errotabere's ranch is like a giant bouquet. The bloom is so heavy that the fallen petals cover the ground like snow. So far this season, the weather has provided a perfect combination of a winter chill followed by increasing temperatures. But, this has been a dry year. Barely an inch of rain has fallen on Errotabere's ranch a few miles east of Harris Ranch along Interstate 5. The almond trees, he said, will require the equivalent of 48 inches of water. That water obviously doesn't fall from the sky over the
Just as Errotabere's almond trees depend on water from the Delta to produce roughly 2 tons of nuts per acre, millions of Californians rely on the Delta as well. So do countless species of fish and birds in this troubled estuary, struggling to meet its many missions. Native fish species like smelt and shad are at or near their lowest populations ever recorded. Wildlife agencies are wondering what to do. Experts have suggested everything from moving the massive Central Valley Project pumps to reducing the amount of water pumped to Central Valley farmers and
The declining health of the Delta makes it a potentially unreliable water supply. The situation hasn't gone unnoticed by farmers like the 51-year-old Errotabere, who follow the political landscape of the Delta as closely as their property. Yet they have reacted in a way that may seem surprising. They have partially shifted from annual crops like garlic that, in a drought, can be skipped for a year. And they have planted almonds, which will die without the 48 inches of water needed every year to produce a lucrative crop that has increasing worldwide demand.
"The almond growers have done a fantastic job of keeping the demand growing despite all the predictions of experts like me," said Richard Howitt, a professor of agriculture economics at the
For many farmers, ironically, the inspiration to grow a tree that always needs water began when they didn't have enough. The rethinking came as farmers had to fallow tens of thousands of acres of
Seasonal crops like cotton -- even though one variety is federally subsidized -- began to diminish as farmers cut acres planted in cotton by half. And the Valley began to blossom with almond trees. "The water supply shortage led to the conversion to crops like almonds," said
When Errotabere planted his four varieties of almonds in 1999, farmers throughout the
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/139357.html
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