Less recycled sewage into drinking water means more reliance on the increasingly unstable Colorado River and expensive desal
By MacKenzie Elmer, Voice of San Diego
In September, the San Diego City Council gave the mayor a month to find ratepayers savings on water rates. Tuesday’s the councilmembers’ second attempt to pass a 63 percent water and 31 percent wastewater increase over four years.
Nothing has changed in the proposal.
And everybody’s pointing fingers. The city’s Public Utilities staff blamed the rate hike on the region’s water seller – the San Diego County Water Authority – which sells expensive desalination water from a plant in Carlsbad and imported water from the Colorado River. The Water Authority later blamed the city’s massive project to recycle sewage into drinking water, Pure Water, for the higher water rates on all of its customers, in a Union-Tribune article.
That may be the biggest loser: the second, and largest phase of Pure Water. The project would save millions of gallons of wastewater from being dumped into the ocean and send it instead, treated, through San Diego taps. That’s water San Diegans wouldn’t have to take from the desal plant or Colorado River.
But its future is bleak.
The debate around whether the city should build more wastewater recycling at all unfolded in warring Voice of San Diego Op-Eds: San Diego County Water authority board member Jim Madaffer, who also represents the city of San Diego, said “hit pause.” Environmental attorney who helped put Pure Water in motion, Marco Gonzalez, countered that Madaffer’s stance undermined the city he represents.
At Voice’s Politifest event earlier this month, our editor Scott Lewis asked
Nick Serrano (Mayor Todd Gloria’s deputy chief of staff and chair of the San Diego County Water Authority board) about it.
“We’re currently doing the work to see what level or scale of Phase Two we need to do,” Serrano said.
I asked him again Monday to make sure I understood whether “need to do” meant “do at all?”
“It’s going to happen in some form,” he wrote to me.
It’s clear the city’s Public Utilities Department, led by Juan Guerreiro and Ally Berenter, are doing what they can to preserve Pure Water. A recent Union-Tribune article advertised how new tech in water purification and a rule change at the state could mean “billions of dollars” in savings on that second Pure Water phase.
Instead of pumping recycled sewage water into a reservoir where it has to be cleaned again before heading to taps – the recycled water could be pumped directly into the drinking water system. Bada bing: fewer pipelines needed and money saved.
Everyone is fighting over which water option is the cheapest right now. Which makes sense.
In California, it’s illegal for water agencies to offer discounts to low-income ratepayers. There are discount programs for energy bills (called CARE or FERA). But not water.
“Expensive water is annoying to me because I make enough money to be able to afford it,” said Daniel Enemark, chief economist at the San Diego Regional Policy and Innovation Center, at Politifest. “For others, it’s crushing.”
The first 30 million gallons of Pure Water per day obtained from the project’s first phase (which will get done) cost around $1.5 billion. The second, larger phase, would cost around $4 billion, the Union-Tribune reported. Berenter and Guerreiro showed how Pure Water, in the end, could produce cheaper water than the Water Authority’s sources.
We’ve written a lot about how the business of providing water drives a lot of this conversation. The city of San Diego is the Water Authority’s biggest customer. So if the city develops its own water supply from recycling sewage, the Water Authority’s financial stability goes down the toilet. And that’s precisely why the elusive Phase Two is so politically charged – if that’s built, San Diego thinks it’ll save millions of dollars a month on water bills (money it doesn’t have to pay the Water Authority).
But there’s also the pollution and climate angle here. Pure Water is about preventing wastewater from being, well wasted, by sending it into the ocean. That’s what’s happening now when we flush, much of it goes into the Pacific via the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant. And that’s why environmentalists like Gonzalez fought so hard for a solution to that problem.
The Colorado River is hurting from overuse and a warming climate drying up the resource. Everyone who uses it — including San Diego – is expecting the federal government to throw the hammer down next month on who gets to use the river because nobody can agree on the best path forward. The Water Authority, which has owned up to the fact that the San Diego region now has too much water, is trying to sell its Colorado River water – or its desalted-ocean water from the plant in Carlsbad.
That’s, in part, why it’s saying, “hold up” to the city of San Diego, don’t spend a bunch of money on Pure Water. Let us sell off our supplies instead. However, less water recycling in San Diego means more reliance on the increasingly unstable Colorado River and the increasingly and exorbitantly expensive desalination.
This story was first published by Voice of San Diego. Sign up for VOSD’s newsletters here.
