OC Water Summit 2012

I attended the OC Water Summit at the Grand Californian Hotel, Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California today. Just like last year, it was a day of great presentations with lots of information in an absolutely beautiful facility, as well as a day of meeting and chatting with other passionate water industry professionals. My biggest take away for the day wasn’t even the direct topic of a presentation, but was an affirmation based on related information that California needs to work much harder and faster to develop more regional and local sources of water and stop relying on so much water pumped from the Bay Delta.

Curt Schmutte, P.E., and engineering consultant and expert on the Bay Delta system, gave an info packed and slightly scary overview of all the challenges facing the Bay Delta. It left me feeling like the chances of a total catastrophic failure of the system that draws water from this region to distribute to Southern California is much more likely than it is to get fixed any time soon. From the Bay Delta “holes” as Curt calls them, which are thousands of acres of islands that are up to 30 feet below sea level and still subsiding; to the threats of sea level rise and the potential for significant seismic events, the Bay Delta as it exists now is completely unsustainable.

The presentation by Michael Mann, Nobel Prize winning professor and author on climate change just reinforced the threats to California’s current water distribution system with its predictions of extensive sea level rise and rain fall pattern changes. Unfortunately, many of the audience members were very hung up on the issue of whether climate change is anthropogenic – caused by humans – or not. From a totally pragmatic point of view, who cares; our industry just needs to plan for the inevitable results of the change, not worry so much about what’s causing it. Leave that to others with more expertise in that area.

Even with those threats to the Bay Delta region, there are efforts being made to try and fix it. A big part of that is an upcoming $11.1 billion (yes, billion) bond measure of which a good sized chunk is slated for Bay Delta sustainability projects. But a panel made up of Tracy Rafter, CEO of the Los Angeles Business Federation; Joseph Cruz, Director, California State Council of Laborers; and Adan Ortega, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Water Conservation Partners that talked about this November, 2012 election bond measure had less than positive feelings regarding whether the measure will pass. Given California’s current economic situation, which isn’t good, I don’t think it will pass either.

So if the Bay Delta is in decline and the amount of water available for delivery to points south destined to be reduced, and given that the Colorado River is extensively oversubscribed (not discussed at the Summit), California needs to start developing new regional and local sources of supply, which to me means desalination - both brackish and seawater desalting - and extensive water recycling for potable purposes. And those projects should not be paid through bond measures, the debt service on which just strips money from already decimated programs like education and various social services. The costs should be paid by the users of those projects through water rates, which of course will make rates go up substantially. It’s long past time Californians, and all Americans, start paying the true cost of water through their water bills and learn to appreciate this resource appropriately.