Seaside looks to develop Seaside East, even though there is no water to do so.

The city of Seaside hosted a week-long, three-event charrette from Oct. 24-29 that asked the community one primary question: What kind of development would they like to see on Seaside East, a 625-acre parcel east of Gen. Jim Moore Boulevard that the city inherited from the former Fort Ord?

The event ignored another question: Where is the water to serve the development?

The exercise, which was delayed a year by the pandemic, was conducted by urban planning firm DPZ, which former city manager Craig Malin enthusiastically recruited for the process, saying the firm had written the book on eliminating urban sprawl.

At an Oct. 27 presentation at the Oldemeyer Center, DPZ’s Marina Khoury outlined the “dire” need to build more housing in the area, noting that Seaside home values have more than doubled since 2012.

“It takes longer to permit a project than it did to fight the Second World War,” Khoury said. “There has got to be a better way.”

She claimed there aren’t enough infill opportunities in Seaside to meet the city’s housing needs, and presented four preliminary development scenarios for Seaside East of varying intensity, from 2,169 housing units to 6,978 units. (All the scenarios also include athletic fields, civic buildings and commercial space.)

An informal poll at the end of the event showed the most popular scenario among attendees included 2,357 housing units; the second most popular had 6,978 units.

But without a new water supply, what is the point of planning a development on the site right now? Like all former Fort Ord land, Marina Coast Water District is the contracted water provider, and its entire water supply derives from groundwater in an area heavily impacted by seawater intrusion. More than half of that water comes from what’s called the deep aquifer, which is 900 feet underground and holds water believed to be more than 20,000 years old, and that is not replenishing.

Because of that dicey water supply, Marina Coast entered into a legal settlement in 2018 with local land use watchdogs Keep Fort Ord Wild and Landwatch, in which MCWD agreed not to supply groundwater to more than 6,160 units in the former Fort Ord. Including projects already approved but not yet built, that cap has already been exceeded by more than 100 units.

By the time MCWD can secure a new water supply – if that were to happen – it will likely take many years, at which point Seaside’s community might want something entirely different.

Seaside Economic Development Manager Trevin Barber says the reason the planning is taking place now is so that the city can incorporate it into the city’s general plan update, which has been going on for several years.

“We want to fill in that hole with some colors,” Barber says of the land. He expects a vision derived from the charrette to be presented to the city council in the first quarter of 2022.