Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
April 2, 2007
4. Water Quality
GROUNDWATER CONTAMINATION:
Morro Bay won't have to resort to tainted wells - San Luis Obispo Tribune
REGULATION:
Council to plunge into election on clean-water fee -
GROUNDWATER CONTAMINATION:
By Sona Patel, staff writer
The city uses state water for most of the year. But the system that delivers that supply closes for upkeep once a year for about a week and a half.
When such maintenance was being done in November, the city switched to its groundwater wells.
But city officials soon sent out a warning not to drink tap water after discovering that six of the wells were producing water that exceeded state standards for nitrates.
Nitrates inhibit the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and can be harmful — especially for pregnant women, infants and people with blood diseases.
This year, city officials are prepared and say they’ve already fired up their seawater desalination plant and begun storing water in tanks.
"By the next shutdown, we’ll have enough water to meet that demand entirely," Public Services Director Bruce Ambo said.
As well, the city will run the desal plant through the next state water shutdown to be prepared in case additional water is needed.
Besides desalinating seawater for drinking, the plant can be used — as it was during the November shutdown — to clean high-nitrate water.
If the city doesn’t have enough water stored for the shutdown, it can desalinate seawater and purify groundwater as needed.
City officials started the plant in November after the high nitrate levels were discovered — to both desalinate seawater and purify the tainted groundwater.
But Ambo said they could not have relied only on the desal plant — which the city has used only in emergencies — in November because it hadn’t produced enough water in advance to serve the city for those few days.
After the nitrates were discovered last year, the city shifted to three other, non-tainted wells and got an emergency allocation of state water, in addition to using the desal plant.
The desal plant costs about $1,000 a day to operate. That will cost a total of $10,000 to $11,000 to run through the next shutdown. But city officials said the cost will not require any rate increases.
The city does not yet know when this year’s state water system maintenance will occur.
Ongoing concern
Nitrates have remained a hot topic at City Council meetings since last year’s scare.
In the weeks following the contamination, several residents criticized the city’s system for notifying the public of the problem, saying that word about the tainted water didn’t get out quickly enough. A group of residents — mostly mothers of young children — urged the city to revise its notification system.
Residents continued to criticize the city on its notification system until the council voted in February to improve it.
Council members agreed to amend the plan to include fliers distributed door to door to warn residents of the potential danger of nitrates and advise residents not to drink tap water if the city’s supply is tainted.
Earlier this week, county health officer Greg Thomas made a presentation to the council informing it of the health effects of nitrates.
Thomas noted that infants — particularly those younger than 6 months — are most prone to serious health problems from drinking water with high levels of nitrates.
He added that drinking water isn’t the only source of nitrates. Excess amounts can be found in packaged baby foods such as green beans, carrots, squash, spinach and beets, which he said should be avoided for infants younger than 3 months.
He recommended residents use bottled water for drinking and cooking and limit well-water usage to bathing and showering if high nitrate levels are found again.
Although the city was using a tainted water supply for less than a week, Thomas said that still presents a potential health concern.
"State and federal guidelines are there to protect the public," he said. #
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispotribune/17005025.htm
REGULATION:
Council to plunge into election on clean-water fee
By Lola Sherman, staff writer
The city has been levying a fee for several years to help it comply with federal and state regulations requiring the cleanup of storm and other runoff waters.
But in 1996,
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Organization has challenged
The Jarvis group has issued similar challenges to two of
A fourth
In
“It's a really small part” of the residents' overall water-sewer bill, City Manager Lauraine Brekke-Esparza said yesterday. The average home pays just over $127 a month, city finance director Kim Krause said.
Resident Robert Stellar has asked the city to give back the $433,415 it collected between July 1, 2003, and last June.
Instead, the council is planning an election. It has a few choices:
At a cost of about $2,700, it could send a mail ballot to all property owners and hope that a majority would approve the fee.
It could call an election of registered voters at a cost of about $90,000 for a special election or about $4,000 if the issue is piggybacked onto one of the 2008 general elections.
Or it could try a rarely used mail ballot that calls for the votes to be dropped off and then counted by the county registrar of voters.
The latter two methods require a two-thirds majority for passage.
Council members have scheduled Monday's meeting at an earlier-than-usual time, 4:30 p.m., in the
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070331/news_1mi31fee.html
####
No comments:
Post a Comment