Marina Coast alleges Salinas stakeholders are reneging on recycled water deal.

Marina Coast Water District isn’t getting its way. First, the Fort Ord Reuse Authority (FORA) board snubbed its proposed desalination plant. Now, the Marina Coast board claims other agencies are stiffing it on recycled water, its other main option for supplying built-out areas of the former Fort Ord.

Under a 1989 annexation agreement, Marina Coast sends its wastewater to Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency (PCA), with an understanding the district can use some of the reclaimed water.

But they disagree on just how much. According to PCA General Manager Keith Israel, Marina Coast has a right to the 1,300 acre-feet of wastewater that flows to the PCA from Central Marina every year. The disagreement, he says, is whether the district gets dibs on an additional 700 acre-feet that flows from the Ord Community.

Every drop matters because in 2007, FORA tasked Marina Coast with providing 2,400 acre-feet of water per year to the Ord Community.

That takes us to yet another agreement. In 2009, PCA agreed to provide the district with 650 acre-feet of summer recycled water, plus the district’s existing right to 300 acre-feet, for Ord irrigation.

In a May 5 letter to FORA, district board President Howard Gustafson alleges the county Water Resources Agency and Salinas Valley growers are refusing to let Marina Coast cash in its recycled wastewater tokens.

“Those negotiations are offering [Marina Coast] little hope that the deliveries of water… will be forthcoming,” District Interim General Manager Bill Kocher writes by email.

District board member Tom Moore, who along with Jan Shriner voted against sending the letter, questions that assumption.

“I have heard nothing,” he writes by email, “to indicate that agricultural interests from the Salinas Valley are repudiating their longstanding, explicit recognition of [Marina Coast’s] senior rights to reclaimed water.”