Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 6, 2008
4. Water Quality –
Santa Barbara Council Tables Decision on Desalination Plant
Noozhawk- 8/6/08
State close to approving desalination plant: Company says it can produce 50 million gallons of drinking water a day from the
Associated Press- 8/6/08
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Noozhawk- 8/6/08
Officials vote 3-2 in favor of spending $122,000 for a study, then instead postpone the matter after learning that four yes votes are required to authorize the expenditure.
The Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday tabled until next week a vote on whether to spend $122,000 on a study that would look into the logistics of rebooting the long-dormant desalination plant that can convert ocean water into drinking water.
The decision came immediately after a technical mix-up: The council, with two members absent, voted 3-2 to fund the study. However, city attorney Steve Wiley pointed out that the city charter calls for a minimum of four yes votes when the item in question calls for spending taxpayer money.
The Charles Meyer Desalination Facility, at 525 Yanonali St., was built in 1991 for $34 million — the equivalent of about $75 million in today’s dollars — after voter approval amid a local drought that lasted five years. It was constructed in less than a year, and had been in operation for just two weeks when a spell of rain finally put an end to the drought.
Officials say that the main purpose of the plant, which has been offline since 1992, is to hedge against drought and catastrophes such as earthquakes, which potentially could destroy some of the infrastructure that brings state water to the Cachuma Lake reservoir.
They say that the timing of the proposal is unrelated to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s drought proclamation in June for the state of
Speaking to the council on Tuesday, city Water Resources Supervisor Bill Ferguson said there are no plans to reactivate the desalination plant, but added that a study would look at what would need to be done if circumstances called for bringing it back online.
Specifically, the proposed study is broken down into two portions. A $74,000 phase-one study would assess the condition of the plant and investigate how much it would cost to fire it back up. A $48,000 phase two would be a more general study of the technological changes that desalination plants have undergone in recent years.
The debate on Tuesday centered on several issues. Most skeptical of the proposal was Councilman Das Williams, who, along with Helene Schneider, voted against bankrolling the entire study.
Williams said the study is premature, and cited as one of his concerns the large amount of energy required to operate a desalination plant.
“All of the efforts we have made in the last six years to reduce energy use could be wiped out overnight by getting that desalination plant online,” he said.
Instead, he advocated studying additional conservation and water recycling methods first, then possibly coming back to the desalination examination.
Williams also expressed concern that the plant might one day be used to accommodate the expansion of development.
Williams said that although the stated intention has been to provide a backup supply of water in case of emergency, he has heard staff members toss around words such as “base-loading,” which is a technical term for increasing the total supply of water, ostensibly to accommodate a growing population.
Lastly, Williams argued that
“If we’re creating yet another backup source,” he said, “what we are really doing is creating a backup for somebody else, and the ratepayers for our agency in
Schneider said she was willing to compromise by spending just $74,000 for the first phase of the study, but preferred to wait on spending $48,000 for the second phase.
Council members Dale Francisco and Roger Horton, along with Mayor Marty Blum, said that funding the full $122,000 study was the best way to go.
Francisco said there are two separate issues: the political decision of what to do with the water, and the technical question of what would need to be done to get the facility back up and running in the event of an emergency. He said it was the latter technical issue that the council was addressing.
“I could see a major earthquake shutting off one or more of the water tunnels for some amount of time, and there would be a lot of finger-pointing, and they would be pointing justifiably at us for having not gone forward with this,” he said.
Blum said she doesn’t think the desalination plant could be used to encourage additional development because of the cost involved with converting the water is high.
“The cost is so huge you can only really do it in an emergency,” she said.
After it was discovered that the 3-2 vote wasn’t enough for approval, Williams suggested that the council consider Schneider’s idea: funding just the $74,000 portion of the study. Instead, the council voted 4-1 — with Williams again voting no — to postpone the item until next week.
When the plant was constructed in the early 1990s, the Montecito and
The agencies’ portion of the plant, which made up a little more than half of the capacity, was sold and shipped to a company in
The plant has the capacity to deliver about 3,125 acre-feet of water to
The study, if approved by the council, would be conducted by Carollo Engineers, based in
State close to approving desalination plant: Company says it can produce 50 million gallons of drinking water a day from the
Associated Press- 8/6/08
(08-06) 04:00 PDT
In green-lighting the project, the California Coastal Commission, which meets Wednesday, would go against the advice of its staff, which has long opposed the desalination plant proposed just north of
If built by Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources Corp., the $300 million plant would be the largest of its kind in the
More than a dozen other desalination plants are under consideration across
"In the nine months since we got preliminary approval, the governor declared a statewide drought, there's been a water state of emergency in nine counties in Northern California, and the agricultural industry in San Diego has had 30 percent of its water cut," said Scott Maloni, vice president of Poseidon Resources. "Things are getting bad. There's no silver bullet here, but we're also not going to conserve and recycle our way out of this water crisis."
The Poseidon proposal received conditional approval from the Coastal Commission in November and has won political support in
"Today, there are 21,000 desalination plants producing 3 billion gallons of drinking water a day in 120 countries around the world," said a letter written by members of the county's congressional delegation urging approval.
Should Poseidon get approval from the commission this week, the company hopes to break ground next year and produce clean water by 2011.
The plant would suck in 100 million gallons of seawater a day. After being filtered through reverse osmosis to remove salt and impurities, half the water could be used by consumers, with the rest returned to the ocean.
When fully operational, the plant could be producing about 10 percent of the county's water supply, or enough for 300,000 people, Maloni said.
Getting that final approval, however, is contingent on commissioners endorsing the company's plan to make the plant carbon neutral and to work to restore wetlands to make up for the marine life that will get drawn in and killed through the plant's intake system.
In both instances, the commission staff said the company has fallen short.
Peter Douglas, the commission's executive director, said staffers disagree with Poseidon on how much carbon dioxide the plant will emit and asserts the company has some "convoluted process to verify their greenhouse gas reductions."
Commission staff is also asking for the company to restore as much as 68 acres of coastal wetlands. Poseidon has agreed to about 42 acres and has yet to come up with a site,
"They're just asking us to buy a pig in a poke, and we've never done that,"
Mark Massara, director of the Sierra Club's California Coastal Program, opposed the project and was critical of the commission's earlier decision to give the project preliminary approval. Final approval is likely, he said.
"They said, 'We'll approve this project and then figure out what the damages are,"' he said. "My sense is you've already told them you're going to give away the store, why try and defend it now?"#
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/06/BALB125LT8.DTL
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