Last night the Monterey Peninsula Regional Water Authority, made up of the six Peninsula mayors, met to talk about two major jams on the road to California American Water's proposed seawater desalination project.
One problem: a California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) judge's decision to push back the public comment deadline for the project's draft environmental impact report (EIR) because of a potential conflict of interest. The other: the shutdown of Cal Am's test well in early June after the nearby groundwater level dropped.
Here's the letter the mayors agreed to send today.
An important request comes on the letter's third page. The mayors are asking the PUC to coordinate with the State Water Resources Control Board on a request to extend the state cease-and-desist order for Cal Am to dramatically cut back its pumping of the Carmel River at the end of 2016.
The Peninsula mayors have long portrayed the December 2016 river cutback deadline as a Sword of Damocles. If the deadline isn't extended, Cal Am is required to stop pumping roughly 70 percent of what it's historically taken from the Carmel River, essentially cutting the Peninsula's water supply in half.
That, the mayors say, could kill the Peninsula's tourism economy by leaving only enough water for residents' basic health and safety. The prospect is so dire, they've argued, that they need to back whichever of the three competing desalination projects—Cal Am's Monterey Peninsula Water Supply Project, the People's Moss Landing Water Desal Project or DeepWater Desal—has the best chance of coming online first.
The MPRWA determined that project was Cal Am's. But when it became clear Cal Am's project could not possibly begin producing a new water supply by December 2016, the mayors and others engaged the state water board in negotiations over a potential extension of the river cutback deadline.
The state water board was expected to vote on that draft agreement, Burnett explained by phone on Monday, only after the final EIR for Cal Am's project is certified. But the recent EIR delay, Burnett says, could push the final EIR certification back to summer 2016—too late, from his perspective, for the state water board to extend the river cutback deadline before it kicks in that December.
"It is incredibly painful for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the [river cutback order] deadline," Burnett says. "This is exactly the sort of thing we didn’t want to have before us. But here we are.”
So, the mayors are asking the PUC to back them up in asking the state water board to vote on the extension request by spring 2016, before the EIR is certified.
"There’s nothing magical about having the final EIR except it demonstrates this project is in fact moving forward," Burnett says. "We will need to demonstrate that in other ways.”