If it involves water in Monterey County, it’s rarely simple, and usually contentious.
Such is the landscape in Marina Coast Water District’s current pursuit to expand its district boundaries into the former Fort Ord, where it already provides customers with water and wastewater services. Because those customers are outside the district’s existing boundaries – which encompass all parts of Marina not on the former Army base – they do not get to vote or run for board positions in Marina Coast’s elections.
Over the past decade, the Fort Ord Reuse Authority has encouraged Marina Coast to annex the Ord community into its boundaries so that those residents could participate in district elections. Marina Coast submitted a proposal to annex the entire former Fort Ord in 2011.
The Local Agency Formation Commission of Monterey County, which must approve annexations, deemed the proposal too broad, and told Marina Coast to scale it back to only cover areas with existing or anticipated development. The proposal also got pushback from Seaside County Sanitation District, which currently provides wastewater service to Del Rey Oaks, Sand City and all parts of Seaside not in the former Army base.
At the time, SCSD expressed its desire to annex all Fort Ord land in Seaside and Del Rey Oaks, something the district would still like to pursue.
Both Marina Coast and SCSD are preparing to submit annexation proposals to LAFCO in the coming weeks, but both draft proposals may overlap in parts of Seaside for which Marina Coast is already providing water and wastewater service.
LAFCO Executive Officer Kate McKenna spoke to this potential problem at a Jan. 22 board meeting.
“Such a conflict is undesirable,” she said, “in that it would make it more difficult, complex, time-consuming and costly for LAFCO to figure out the appropriate way to go forward.”
She encouraged both parties to address the issue before submitting applications. To that end, Seaside City Manager Craig Malin and Marina Coast General Manager Keith Van Der Maaten will meet in the coming weeks, along with their respective board chairs Ralph Rubio and Tom Moore, to attempt to come to an agreement.
Among the sticking points is that Marina Coast owns all the infrastructure in the area of potential overlap.
“From a legal and engineering standpoint, we don’t see eye to eye,” Van Der Maaten says. “Our system works well, we have the wastewater capacity, and we don’t see the sense in putting someone else’s name on it and then flow [the wastewater] through our system.”