Mar 11 2014
How To Spend $707,000 A Day
“San Diego County Water Authority’s New Website Tool Provides Real-Time Calculation of Metropolitan Water District Overcharges” is the headline in the Business Wire on 3/10/2014
This is truly a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if MWD and SDCWA can keep the lawyers out of the room long enough to stop spending money on litigation and start the process of designing and constructing indirect potable recycling (IPR) facilities.
It would be a win/win situation that would forestall raising water rates to
fund the systems and infrastructure for the entire area encompassed by the
behemoth water district called the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California, (MWD), a cooperative of 26 cities and water agencies serving 19
million people in six counties. The district imports water from the Colorado
River and Northern California to supplement local supplies.
MWD is overcharging those 26 cities and agencies almost three quarters of a
million dollars a day currently. And who is paying that? Agri-business and
residential water users. Make no mistake. This blog is not advocating
lowering water rates. It is advocating using the funds to alleviate the
incredible amount of water Southern California imports from the Colorado
River and Northern California. Think about it! Over just a five year period,
at $707,000 dollar a day, the funding would be in place to make IPR systems
a reality for most of Southern California. Doing the math, that is an
astonishing $258 million a year, and in five years, a billion-two (with a
B).
With those kinds of dollars and matching funds and grants, IPR would be a
no-brainer. Wait a minute you say, IPR systems are experimental! Absolutely not. Look around. Orange County has had IPR in place for years and so has Las Vegas which was the subject of a prior blog where it was detailed 92 million gallons per day is recycled back into Lake Mead. As long ago as 1977, the North Lake Tahoe Reclamation District recycled five million
gallons per day back into 100 wells in and around Truckee, CA. We need to
stop studying and start doing. A lake or an aquifer is all that is needed to
receive the recycled water.
San Diego spent a million bucks setting up the San Diego Water Purification
Facility and..surprise..surprise, it turned out to be successful. And now it
sits idle. CH2MHill, Black and Veatch and other large consulting firms are
standing ready to jump in and start the design process. All they need is for
water policy makers and doers to pull the trigger. But first as the
Afterword in Water Shock says, “those who have the power to control the
destiny of finite water resources must do something that is entirely against
human nature-they must set aside their personal agendas and actually work in harmony with the hard fact that the hydrologic cycle is like the law of
gravity. It cannot be repealed”
SDCWA won the day against MWD in the overcharge battle, but we all know all what that means to lawyers is… “what a great billing opportunity…it will be in the courts for years to come.” That’s why I said, get the lawyers out of
the room long enough to let those who really have the rate payers interests
at heart actually do something for them, and make progress toward water
independence for the 26 cities and water districts. Sure, it’s an uphill
battle. We are only three years into this drought. Every year the drought
deepens we are further and further away from water independence. When the
toilets stop flushing and the water taps are dry it will be too late.
Milt Burgess
The Montanan
About Alumni at the University of Montana