32 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY december 7-13, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com sion between two projects that could bring an end to the cease-and-desist order, Cal Am’s proposed desalination plant or a recycled water expansion, could also fill a game board. Each path is littered with pitfalls and red tape. The Weekly has created a game that captures the basic elements of that struggle, but before we get there, it’s useful to take a step back and look at the broader contours of the water supply story. So let’s start at the beginning. In the early 1880s, the Pacific Improvement Company, which was led by four railroad barons, had purchased much of the Monterey Peninsula’s real estate, including the land where the company built the former Hotel Del Monte in 1880 at the current location of the Naval Postgraduate School. The hotel needed a better water supply, so the company facilitated the construction of the first-ever dam on the Carmel River, which supplied about 400 acre-feet annually to the hotel. Samuel Morse, manager of the Pacific Improvement Company, which built the hotel, formed his own company in 1919, Del Monte Properties, and acquired PIC’s assets. But there was no water to develop Pebble Beach, so he initiated the construction of the San Clemente Dam, which was completed in 1921, to replace the old dam and facilitate the growth of the Monterey Peninsula. A company called California Water & Telephone Co. later acquired that dam and infrastructure, and constructed Los Padres Dam, which was built in 1949. After a failed attempt at a public buyout, Cal Am bought the company’s assets in 1966. Water rationing was imposed on the Peninsula in the mid-1970s due to drought, and in 1978, voters approved the formation of the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District. Its enabling legislation in the state water code reads, in part: “The Legislature finds and declares that it is necessary to create a public agency to carry out such functions which can only be effectively performed by government, including, but not limited to, management and regulation of the use, reuse, reclamation, conservation of water and bond financing of public works projects…The enactment of this special law is necessary for the public welfare and the protection of environmental quality and the health and property of the residents therein.” Nonetheless, Cal Am kept pumping away, desiccating the riparian habitat along much of the Carmel River, which is vital habitat for life, including steelhead trout, which since 1997 have been classified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. That overpumping led to the Carmel River Steelhead Association to file a complaint with the State Water Board in 1987. Three other groups filed similar complaints in subsequent years: the Resident’s Water Committee in 1989, and the Sierra Club and the California Department of Parks and Recreation in 1991. Those complaints led to the State Water Board, in 1995, issuing an order—Order 95-10—to Cal Am that prescribed several measures the company should take to decrease its dependence and impact on the Carmel River. It was essentially a cease-and-desist order lacking enforcement teeth. It states, “The imposition of monetary penalties make little sense.” That same order established that Cal Am’s legal right to Carmel River was only 3,376 acre-feet annually, just a fraction of the approximately 14,000 acre-feet it was pumping from the river at the time. (By comparison, Cal Am’s local customers used just 9,118 acre-feet from all sources—including the river, Seaside Basin, recycled and stored water—from Oct. 1, 2022 to Sept. 30, 2023. That’s less than the 9,516 acrefeet used in the 2022 water year, and well below the 10-year average of 9,813 acre-feet annually. The lowering demand is due to conservation measures, the impact of high prices—which reduce demand—but for 2023 specifically, less water was used for irrigation due to the wet winter.) Also in 1995, Peninsula voters rejected, by a 57-43 margin, a new Los Padres Dam project. But Cal Am forged ahead nonetheless—ignoring the will of voters—and spent nearly $8.4 million on the project over the next eight years, which was passed on to ratepayers despite producing no new dam and zero drops added to the water supply. In 2009, frustrated by Cal Am’s inability to augment its water supply, the State Water Board finally put some teeth into the matter, issuing a ceaseand-desist order to force the utility to reduce its pumping of the Carmel River to its legal right by the end of 2016. Per the order, Cal Am had to stop setting new water meters within its service area, freezing new development. Thus began the Peninsula’s current state of water poverty. Even before the cease-and-desist order, there was a push to start looking toward the sea as a potential water source. The desalination project that emerged initially, in 2008, was called the Regional Water Project, which had a complex ownership and operating structure between public agencies and Cal Am. But in 2011, the project imploded amid felony conflict-of-interest charges against a Monterey County Water Resources Agency board member, Steve Collins, who was also acting as a consultant for Marina Coast Water District on the project. So Cal Am started looking anew to create its own project, utilizing slant wells on the beach in Marina, at the site of the now-mothballed Cemex sand mine. That Cal Am chose to pursue a project with slant wells—which draw in brackish groundwater in a basin already severely impacted by saltwater intrusion—quickly became a lightning rod of controversy, as did the fact that the City of Marina didn’t want the project, which is proposed to be within city limits. The city sued in 2020, alleging adverse impacts on the city’s groundwater supply, and claiming Cal Am didn’t have the water rights to pump there. Those claims remain in litigation. But slant wells, Cal Am has maintained from the outset of the project being proposed, were the only type of desal project the company thought state and federal regulators would approve. Since the implementation of the state’s Ocean Policy in 2015, slant wells are explicitly preferred by state regulatory agencies over open intake, which can harm marine life. It seems unlikely—or impossible, probably—for an open ocean intake desalination project to gain approval, particularly in a federally protected marine sanctuary. But the rub is that, in an area with a critically overdrafted groundwater basin being ever more impacted by seawater intrusion, it’s also not clear slant wells can operate without harming other local water supplies. Slant wells are also considerably more expensive to operate and maintain than open ocean intake desal projects. For one, pumping water through sand requires more energy. Nonetheless, compelled by Cal Am’s arguments for an overwhelming need for the project, the California Public Utilities Commission approved it in September 2018, provided that it “will not injure other lawful users of water.” At that meeting, which took place in San Francisco, former Marina Coast Water District general manager Keith Van Der Maaten told the Weekly, “This is a groundwater extraction plant disguised as a desal plant, and they’re Scores of local residents spoke for and against Cal Am’s proposed desal project at a California Coastal Commission meeting in 2022; at the end of the meeting, the commission voted to approve the project, with a long list of conditions. Daniel Driefuss
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