Peninsula water politics create a wedge on Salinas City Council.

Members of local city councils and various special districts are elected to serve their city or district. But they also are appointed to fill various roles on boards of directors for regional agencies, giving them additional influence. Entities like Monterey-Salinas Transit, the Transportation Agency for Monterey County and Central Coast Community Energy are governed by appointees from various elected boards.

These appointments can sometimes take on the tone of a perfunctory assignment process.

Sometimes, the appointment process represents something much bigger. In the case of a seat for a member of Salinas City Council to Monterey One Water, the regional sewer treatment agency, it is political. A tense 5-2 vote on Tuesday, Feb. 6 to remove Mayor Kimbley Craig from the M1W board and instead appoint Councilmember Anthony Rocha was a blow to Craig, but also a sign of a bigger proxy battle in Monterey Peninsula water politics seeping into the Salinas Valley.

A sewer district is perhaps an unlikely place for water supply politics to play out, but M1W is increasingly focused on transforming wastewater into irrigation and/or drinking water.

The agency’s board already voted back in 2021 to expand its Pure Water Monterey project, which super-treats sewage to safe drinking water levels, as part of the Monterey Peninsula’s water supply. Support for that project became controversial, a stand-in for one’s support or skepticism of California American Water’s proposed desalination plant.

By the time Craig joined the board of M1W in 2023, the Pure Water Monterey expansion was well underway. One thing she advocated for in her short tenure is adjusting the weighted voting system on M1W to better represent Salinas. For over 50 years, each member agency on M1W gets a vote weighted according to population (the Del Rey Oaks member now gets one vote, to Monterey’s three, to Salinas’ six). But Salinas represents over 56 percent of M1W’s population, and its weighted vote is just 27 percent.

In September, the M1W board discussed the possibility of a new formula. Deliberations and a decision will be forthcoming this year.

“I finally feel after 40 years that we are having a very open discussion about the weighted vote,” Craig said in defense of her leadership. Rocha says, “I want to build upon the work Kimbley has started to make sure that Salinas has adequate, fair representation.”

Underlying their public statements, however, is where politics start to matter. A change to the weighted vote on M1W requires each of 10 member agencies to approve the change.

Can Salinas get buy-in from across the Lettuce Curtain to increase its share of the vote? Both Craig and Rocha seem to think they are up to the task. But there’s a possibility that Rocha will have a better chance of doing so. And that’s because of an entirely separate vote Craig cast on a separate matter on a different regional board. In 2021, she cast a no vote on the Local Agency Formation Commission of Monterey County regarding a request from the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District to pursue eminent domain to buy out Cal Am. Rocha may still have a hard time persuading all entities on the board to empower Salinas with a greater share of the vote, but he may have an easier time of it than Craig. Old grudges die hard in Peninsula water politics.

“Kimbley has represented the city to the best of her abilities,” Rocha says. “However, I believe there are outstanding factors related to her vote on LAFCO that have hindered her ability to be effective.”

Meanwhile, there is real fallout on Salinas City Council. “I don’t, frankly, see why this needs to be a divisive conversation,” said Councilmember Carla Viviana González. “I hope we look beyond personal or political agendas and see that this is a team.” It’s hard to see how it can feel anything but divisive when Craig faces a 5-2 vote to oust her after she developed a transparent, public-facing methodology for making appointments. “This council has asked me to be collaborative, has asked me to be compromising and I feel like I have done that,” she said.

That is clearly the case. But no olive branch is long enough to cross the gulf of Monterey Peninsula water politics.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com.