The Rosewood Miramar Beach Resort will soon add bigger water lines after the Montecito Water District approved a developer appeal Thursday.
Los Angeles developer Caruso Affiliated filed the appeal last month after district staff members decided they couldn’t approve the re-sizing, noting a conflict with a recent ordinance that prevented officials from issuing any new meters.
The district passed Ordinance 92 in late 2014 in response to the ongoing drought, but developers were allowed to appeal a decision to the full board for a vote.
The district board unanimously voted to allow the change this week, with the explicit understanding that developers would not use more water than allotted in their permits, according to Lois Werner of the water district.
Caruso Affiliated plans to replace five existing meters — three 2-inch meters, one 1.5-inch and one 1-inch — with two 6-inch meters to serve the 170-room resort set to be built on 16 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Miramar Beach in Montecito.
While Caruso Affiliated will pay to resize the meters that would have more access to water overall, Dick Shaikewitz, president of the district’s board of directors, has said he wasn’t concerned because the water district could still oversee how much is used and fine/penalize accordingly.
Developers hope to break ground in mid-April at the earliest, with a completion date in April 2018, Shaikewitz said.
Caruso Affiliated waited eight years for the right combination of financing and approvals after buying the beachfront property in 2007, twice receiving approval for past iterations of the resort project.
The Rosewood Miramar hotel gained final approval in April 2015 under the promise to use no more than 45 acre-feet of water (or 14.6 million gallons) per year.
The proposed improvements are supposed to bring the resort in line with best engineering practices for a five-star, campus-style resort hotel, which requires fire flow and domestic water demands to be combined in a private water system with two points of connection to public water mains, according to the application filed by Peter Hayden, Caruso Affiliated’s senior vice president of engineering.
New meters would be available for an unlikely fire event at a flow rate of 2,000 gallons per minute, Hayden said.
With larger meters, developers would go from paying monthly water service charges of no more than $221.45 per meter (a 2-inch) to $1,384.08 per month for a 6-inch meter.
Developers have said water consumption would not increase, showing updated estimated water usage at 43.71 acre-feet annually.
— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.