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Santa Barbara Council Tables Decision on Desalination Plant
The Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday tabled until next week a vote on whether to spend $122,000 on a study that would look into the logistics of rebooting the long-dormant desalination plant that can convert ocean water into drinking water.
The decision came immediately after a technical mix-up: The council, with two members absent, voted 3-2 to fund the study. However, city attorney Steve Wiley pointed out that the city charter calls for a minimum of four yes votes when the item in question calls for spending taxpayer money.
Officials say that the main purpose of the plant, which has been offline since 1992, is to hedge against drought and catastrophes such as earthquakes, which potentially could destroy some of the infrastructure that brings state water to the Cachuma Lake reservoir.
They say that the timing of the proposal is unrelated to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s drought proclamation in June for the state of California, noting that the Cachuma Lake reservoir is virtually full, and as such has the ability to provide water to the area for five more dry years. Rather, the proposal is part of a comprehensive effort to update the city’s General Plan, they said.
Speaking to the council on Tuesday, city Water Resources Supervisor Bill Ferguson said there are no plans to reactivate the desalination plant, but added that a study would look at what would need to be done if circumstances called for bringing it back online.
Specifically, the proposed study is broken down into two portions. A $74,000 phase-one study would assess the condition of the plant and investigate how much it would cost to fire it back up. A $48,000 phase two would be a more general study of the technological changes that desalination plants have undergone in recent years.
The debate on Tuesday centered on several issues. Most skeptical of the proposal was Councilman Das Williams, who, along with Helene Schneider, voted against bankrolling the entire study.
Williams said the study is premature, and cited as one of his concerns the large amount of energy required to operate a desalination plant.
“All of the efforts we have made in the last six years to reduce energy use could be wiped out overnight by getting that desalination plant online,” he said.
Instead, he advocated studying additional conservation and water recycling methods first, then possibly coming back to the desalination examination.
Williams also expressed concern that the plant might one day be used to accommodate the expansion of development. Williams said that although the stated intention has been to provide a backup supply of water in case of emergency, he has heard staff members toss around words such as “base-loading,” which is a technical term for increasing the total supply of water, ostensibly to accommodate a growing population.
Lastly, Williams argued that Santa Barbara already enjoys a healthy emergency reserve, noting that, in addition to Cachuma, the city receives water from the State Water Project, the Gibraltar Reservoir on the Santa Ynez River, groundwater and recycled water. Many of the surrounding agencies, he said, don’t have the same backup supplies.
“If we’re creating yet another backup source,” he said, “what we are really doing is creating a backup for somebody else, and the ratepayers for our agency in Santa Barbara end up paying for the cost, and I have a problem with that.”
Schneider said she was willing to compromise by spending just $74,000 for the first phase of the study, but preferred to wait on spending $48,000 for the second phase.
Council members Dale Francisco and Roger Horton, along with Mayor Marty Blum, said that funding the full $122,000 study was the best way to go.
Francisco said there are two separate issues: the political decision of what to do with the water, and the technical question of what would need to be done to get the facility back up and running in the event of an emergency. He said it was the latter technical issue that the council was addressing.
“I could see a major earthquake shutting off one or more of the water tunnels for some amount of time, and there would be a lot of finger-pointing, and they would be pointing justifiably at us for having not gone forward with this,” he said.
Blum said she doesn’t think the desalination plant could be used to encourage additional development because of the cost involved with converting the water is high.
“The cost is so huge you can only really do it in an emergency,” she said.
After it was discovered that the 3-2 vote wasn’t enough for approval, Williams suggested that the council consider Schneider’s idea: funding just the $74,000 portion of the study. Instead, the council voted 4-1 — with Williams again voting no — to postpone the item until next week.
When the plant was constructed in the early 1990s, the Montecito and Goleta water agencies each had a share in the project. The agencies terminated their involvement at the end of a five-year contract.
The agencies’ portion of the plant, which made up a little more than half of the capacity, was sold and shipped to a company in Saudi Arabia. (That country, incidentally, relies heavily on desalination for its drinking water.)
The plant has the capacity to deliver about 3,125 acre-feet of water to Santa Barbara, about one-fifth of its total demand.
The study, if approved by the council, would be conducted by Carollo Engineers, based in Phoenix.
Noozhawk staff writer Rob Kuznia can be reached at rkuznia@noozhawk.com.
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» on 08.06.08 @ 02:37 PM
Das Williams is a tool. “Conservation is the Key”. He is probably of the same opinion that we should stop drilling for oil and we should turn in our cars for Flinstone vehicles. Why is it that so many liberals do not have common sense?
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» on 08.07.08 @ 08:23 AM
Facts about de-sal you most likely already know.
1. The initial shock treatment to prepare sea water is with a high acid concentration
2. Product water most often is no more the 45% of the total water taken in…50% on a good run
3. Product water used in a test run through the lower east side of the city was so acidic it delaminate older pipes causing leaks and eroding older thin chrome fixtures.
4. The city warned residents that prolonged use of de-sal water would kill most landscaping including trees.
5. The waste water pumped back into the ocean is very concentrated and acidic.
With all of the above, spending on this type of product water is a waste and harmful to the environment. This information was on Fred Vega’s radio show “The Voice of Santa Barbara” years ago. There was an alternative that was less harmful using distillation and providing an exquisite product water that was not harmful to landscaping or pipes. (again a similar problem with waste water)
It would appear the council is trying to justify their intent to go high density through this process of de-sal. The city is in the process of trying to develop new wells to make up for the loss of salt water intrusion. During the last 5 year drought, if it had lasted one more year, there would have been a large die off of the stone pines on Anapamu. Many trees including the eucalyptus tress in Peabody Stadium started to die off and the stone pines were in extreme distress.
The city drilled a well at Alamar and State St. decades ago, and pumped it to find the bottom of the resource. It surprised the water department that before finding the bottom of the well tress north and west as far as Ontare started to die off. This was a wide spread event. The city denied it was their project but the minute they stopped pumping the trees that survived started to revive in 2 weeks and surviving root stock started to sprout.
They drilled a new well in San Roque recently. The city never did a pump to find the bottom or to see the effect on the neighborhood and have declared it to be a success. The question is when they use this to supplement current wells what will happen around the area again?
Santa Barbara and most of the south county is out of water.
No measures of doing away with 8 foot landscape etc. will make up for the needed water if they get their way with high density infills.
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» on 08.07.08 @ 10:00 AM
The claims by HOH MAN are quite interesting but would really be persuasive if they had a citation of the facts other than Fred Vega.
And Das Williams indeed is a tool, of the people who elected him twice and for some actual facts and credible analysis introduced into the City Council deliberations.
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» on 08.09.08 @ 06:05 PM
so they waste $34 million of our money building it, then they want to spend more $$ to “research” whether we need it or not?? typical government logic.
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