At the November 16, 2009 meeting of the Cambria Community Services District meeting, District Engineer Bob Gresens did a presentation on the costs of various potable water supplies for Cambria. If you missed the meeting and don’t have Charter Cable, you were out of luck on seeing the powerpoint. The Cambria CSD added the presentation to its website at least a week ago as an addendum to the November 16, 2009 agenda packet. It took me a while to find it there, but here is the critical page. (Download the full presentation here.)

There are a number of questions we should be asking, starting with the most important one: how much will it cost Cambrians to go from 90%  to 100% reliability from their water system?**(see below) Note that when the aquifers are completely recharged, we have enough water to meet current demand without threat of saltwater intrusion or habitat destruction.

Director DeMicco asked Gresens to show how he arrived at the numbers shown below and will likely do so in a utilities committee meeting. The information in this chart is incomplete or comparing apples with oranges and could be misleading if misunderstood. I encourage you to take it with a grain of salt (no pun intended). I look forward to hearing Mr. Gresens

Cost of Various Water Supply Alternatives

PRESENT WORTH COST SUMMARY OF POTABLE WATER SUPPLY ALTERNATIVES

Alternative Initial Cost 30 yr Present Worth Present Worth $/AF
Independent Nacimiento Pipeline $22 to $23 million $31 to $32 million $1400 to $1430
Whale Rock Exchange $19 million $25 million $1400
Seawater Desalination with Solar Power System $17.2 million $22.3 million $1230
San Simeon Creek Dam & Reservoir $10.7 million $12.8 million $610
Jack Creek Dam & Reservoir $10.3 million $14.2million $680
Notes:

* No outside grant funds were assumed for any of the above project costs.

* Based on earlier 2008 cost-basis comparison with inflation rate at 4% per year.

* Dams not recommended in WMP due to location within critical steelhead habitat.

* Current non-surcharged CCSD residential water rate ~ $1764/af, for 0 to 6 units

* Current overall CCSD water costs ~ $1.8 million water budget/800 af/yr ~ $2250/af

**In Task Two of the District’s Master Plan (a.k.a. the Kennedy Jenks baseline water supply analysis)  the following conclusions were developed:
• The District’s current water supplies are marginal to inadequate to provide a 90 percent level of reliability (i.e., in about one out of ten years there may not be enough water for current customers, who will have to cut back on water use).
• The District’s current water supplies are inadequate to provide a 95 percent level of reliability (i.e., in about one out of twenty years there may be a severe water  shortage and current customers will have to cut back on water use).

The recurrence frequency of incomplete refill in the San Simeon Creek basin has been estimated at 1 year in 34. The return frequency for the same event in Santa Rosa Creek basin has been estimated at 1 year in 25 (Yates, 1991).

It also assumes “Public water utilities should have a water supply reliability of 90 to <100 percent, recognizing that the cost to achieve high levels of reliability may be difficult and expensive. Accordingly, alternative criteria of 90 and 95 percent reliability are presented.”

Based on the evaluation criteria presented in the previous section, the analysis  indicates  the projected ending groundwater level in the San Simeon Creek basin is expected to be above the minimum groundwater level criterion if the basin is completely recharged at the beginning of the Dry Season and the probability that groundwater levels will be sufficiently high at the beginning of the Dry Season to maintain the minimum criteria is near the 90 percent reliability objective but well below the 95 percent reliability objective, particularly in critically dry years.
Also, the expected production requirements from each basin is within its dry season water rights limitations. The results of this dry season evaluation indicate that all of the evaluation criteria except for the 90 percent reliability criterion during extreme critically dry years and the 95 percent reliability criterion are met for current water demands. Therefore, the District’s current water supplies are marginal to inadequate to provide a 90 percent level of reliability for current water demands and are inadequate to provide a 95 percent reliability level.

Additional analysis from the Kennedy Jenks study will follow. Download a version marked with my highlighting here.

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