About Cambria

There are an infinite number of reasons people don’t pursue the facts necessary to make an informed decisions. Some of the reasons are even reasonably valid. (Of course, readers of this site value the access to information needed to make good decisions.) In reality, a majority of folks rely mostly on what they hear from their friends and neighbors, filtered through the their own life experiences.  Sometimes, people add what they learn on paper and online.  It often boils down to sound bites and choosing a side based on what your friends have chosen.

Here are some facts: In 2000 Kennedy-Jenks provided a report that has been the basis for the declaration of the Water Code 350 Emergency and the decision to pursue desalination. The report was part of developing a water master plan and included analysis of water use demand. It reported the average residential connection used about 9 units per billing cycle. They calculated a composite connection use of about 12 units, a number often given as “standard” use.  This “composite connection” was calculated

using the “mean annual” unit demand patterns, and assuming residential connections and commercial connections of 3,586 and 210, respectively, (i.e. their December 1999 values), the estimated residential, commercial, and total annual water demand are 578, 201, and 779 acre-feet, respectively. Dividing these values by the assumed number of connections produces annual residential and commercial unit water demand estimates of 0.161 and 0.959 acre-feet per connection, respectively.

In a recent study (Mayer et al, 1999), the indoor water requirements of 12 utilities were evaluated. One of the locations was Lompoc, California. The results of the evaluation are presented in Table 4-1. The mean daily per capita indoor water for the 12 locations was 69.3 gallons per capita per day (gpcd). The comparable use for Lompoc was 65.8 gpcd*, slightly less than the average. The indoor water uses are almost exclusively for human consumption and sanitation.

For comparison, the typical average annual water demand, both indoor and outdoor, for District customers is approximately 75 gpcd. Because a Dry Season water demand reduction of approximately 20 percent would be necessary to reach the indoor water use estimates, the declaration of a water shortage emergency for health and safety reasons would only be necessary for Stage 3.

*gpcd = gallons per capita per day

Translating gpcd into what you would see on your CCSD bill (which covers 2 months).  A CCSD billing unit is one hundred (100) cubic feet of water or 748 gallons.

65.8 gpcd = 5.4 units pcbm (per capita bi-monthly)

65.8 gpcd = 5.7 units pcbm (per capita bi-monthly)

75 gpcd = 6.1 units pcbm (per capita bi-monthly)

50 gpcd  = 4.1 units pcbm (per capita bi-monthly)

The May meeting of the CCSD Board provided some glimpses on some of the most critical policies of the District. The district is pursuing desalination at any cost, virtually ignoring the most cost effective element of its “balanced portfolio” of water supply: conservation.

Some evidence: Over $6,000 a month on a lobbyist for desal, at least a portion of the district engineer’s salary, and untold hours of staff time in just one month of spending versus $2,000 (or less) budgeted for the entire year for the rebate program that offers $150 for every water conserving replacement of a toilet or washer. In fact, the entire budget for 2009-10 for conservation programs is less than what they plan to pay the desal lobbyist.

Policy is a social choice. It is not determined by science, although it is, or should be, informed by such.

A couple of years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) noted the critical “importance of sustaining our Nation’s water and wastewater infrastructure. Effective utility management is key to achieving this goal. Effective management can help utilities enhance the stewardship of their infrastructure, improve performance in critical areas, and respond to other challenges.”

Put plainly, management of our water and wastewater system is not to be taken lightly.  A committee of industry leaders from seven organizations  (AMWA, APWA, AWWA, EPA, NACWA, NAWC,and WEF) found that water sector utilities across the country face common challenges, such as rising costs and workforce complexities, and that utilities need to focus attention on these areas to deliver quality products and services and sustain community support.

There are ten attributes provide a succinct indication of where effectively-managed utilities focus and what they strive to achieve.

The Attributes are:

1. Product Quality: Produces potable water, treated effluent, and process residuals in full compliance with regulatory and reliability requirements and consistent with customer, public health, and ecological needs.
2. Customer Satisfaction: Provides reliable, responsive, and affordable services in line with explicit, customer-accepted service levels. Receives timely customer feedback to maintain responsiveness to customer needs and emergencies.
3. Employee and Leadership Development: Recruits and retains a workforce that is competent, motivated, adaptive, and safe-working. Establishes a participatory, collaborative organization dedicated to continual learning and improvement. Ensures employee institutional knowledge is retained and improved upon over time. Provides a focus on and emphasizes opportunities for professional and leadership development and strives to create an integrated and well-coordinated senior leadership team.
4. Operational Optimization: Ensures ongoing, timely, cost-effective, reliable, and sustainable performance improvements in all facets of its operations. Minimizes resource use, loss, and impacts from day-to-day operations. Maintains awareness of information and operational technology developments to anticipate and support timely adoption of improvements.
5. Financial Viability: Understands the full life-cycle cost of the utility and establishes and maintains an effective balance between long-term debt, asset values, operations and maintenance expenditures, and operating revenues. Establishes predictable rates-consistent with community expectations and acceptability-adequate to recover costs, provide for reserves, maintain support from bond rating agencies, and plan and invest for future needs.
6. Infrastructure Stability: Understands the condition of and costs associated with critical infrastructure assets. Maintains and enhances the condition of all assets over the long-term at the lowest possible life-cycle cost and acceptable risk consistent with customer, community, and regulator-supported service levels, and consistent with anticipated growth and system reliability goals. Assures asset repair, rehabilitation, and replacement efforts are coordinated within the community to minimize disruptions and other negative consequences.
7. Operational Resiliency: Ensures utility leadership and staff work together to anticipate and avoid problems. Proactively identifies,  assesses, establishes tolerance levels for, and effectively manages a full range of business risks (including legal, regulatory, financial, environmental, safety, security, and natural disaster-related) in a proactive way consistent with industry trends and system reliability goals.
8. Community Sustainability: Is explicitly cognizant of and attentive to the impacts its decisions have on current and long-term future community and watershed health and welfare. Manages operations, infrastructure, and investments to protect, restore, and enhance the natural environment; efficiently use water and energy resources; promote economic vitality; and engender overall community improvement. Explicitly considers a variety of pollution prevention, watershed, and source water protection approaches as part of an overall strategy to maintain and enhance ecological and community sustainability.
9. Water Resource Adequacy: Ensures water availability consistent with current and future customer needs through long-term resource supply and demand analysis, conservation, and public education. Explicitly considers its role in water availability and manages operations to provide for long-term aquifer and surface water sustainability and replenishment.
10. Stakeholder Understanding and Support: Engenders understanding and support from oversight bodies, community and watershed interests, and regulatory bodies for service levels, rate structures, operating budgets, capital improvement programs, and risk management decisions. Actively involves stakeholders in the decisions that will affect them.

The Committee also explored the barriers that can inhibit improved utility management. These challenges and barriers provide insight into where a sector strategy should focus to be effective and how the Collaborating Organizations will want to structure their promotion of effective utility management to help utilities successfully make improvements. Within this context, the Committee identified the findings and recommendations for a future sector strategy. Read the full report here.

Whether you support the decision of the CCSD Board to pursue desalination or not, when/if the plant ever begins operation, there will be additional rate increases to pay for that infrastructure and the processes the water is put through. Determining the cost of service for water  is more complex than a simple online calculator could determine. But to get an idea of how much it could cost you for desalinated water, Click here to enter your numbers to see how much  desal will cost per household, according to this site. Eco World has  a number of interactive calculators, all of which relate in some way to resources and the impacts of their use.

On August 21, 2008,  the  CCSD Board  approved the Final Program Environmental Impact Report of the Water Master Plan and then the Master Plan itself. In a nutshell, it describes the potential impacts adequate, reliable water may have on our community. The Master Plan includes a diversified collection of solutions to the water shortage – with the desalination in the starring role. For more than a dozen years, the CCSD has been working toward making this drought-proof source of water a reality. But acceptance of the Water Master Plan is hardly the end. No, now the really difficult decisions must be considered and action will require our elected officials to really be leaders.

But with the appearance of reliable water, Cambria will lose authority over the pace of growth. For eight years, under the California Water Code 350, the CCSD has administered a moratorium on new water connections. The practical result of this has been a building moratorium, because the County requires proof that the CCSD will provide services for a project before they will issue a permit to build.  When a new reliable water source is available, the CCSD will presumably begin to issue letters of intent to serve to those on the water wait list. If nothing changes with the County plan, the County will issue about 30-35 permits per year until the wait list is exhausted – in 2034.

The issue of growth for Cambria is a hot-button for many who’ve moved here since the 1980′s. The trouble seems to be, once there is enough water for everyone, keeping Cambria a small village will be next to impossible. It is difficult to justify an expensive desalination plant when the gap between available water and the water demand is 50-60 AF (less than Cambria currently use in one month.) It’s also difficult to justify limiting the number of households the CCSD will serve if a desalination plant is humming away, making drinking water enough for a town almost twice as big.

Just from a strict fairness standpoint, refusing to provide water to a property while the one right next door has a virtually unlimited supply to waste feels wrong.  Once the infrastructure is in place, expansion of a desal plant is mind-bogglingly easy. While the CCSD wants to make sure everyone who already lives here has sufficient water, they are also intent on ensuring Cambria remains a small town. It’s an balancing act requiring nimble and principled leaders and no small amount of strategy.  Private property rights must be balanced with the community’s desire to maintain the village atmosphere. They must consider the capacity of the resources and manage them appropriately. And let’s face it, managing an absolute known quantity is much easier than planning for an unknown number of homes using however much water they want from aquifers of  unknown capacity.

Cambria’s Water Master Plan defines the number of connections and a specific amount of water that will be available to those connections. It also describes a program that meant to keep Cambria from “Carmelizing” when water is no longer a limited resource. It’s called the Buildout Reduction Program.  In a nutshell, the program says, we like our town small and forested and it should stay that way, so we’ll just buy up the undeveloped properties and preserve them as open space. This plan would seem ludicrous or unworkable in many places, but not in Cambria. About 10 years ago, Cambrians organized and raised the support and money to purchase the Fiscalini Ranch (Called the East-West Ranch at the time) to prevent development on it.  Since then, Greenspace, the Cambria Land Trust, and others have worked to buy and retire vacant lots as they went up for sale with the intention they would always be open space. I’m sure it was this momentum, coupled with individual landowners recording conservation easements in many places, that CCSD intended to capitalize on and carry through into the envisioned Buildout Reduction Program (or Plan).

Unfortunately, no amount of momentum or determination on the part of Cambrians can force property owners to sell or voluntarily give up their property. In fact, a few of those property owners are who think they have a right to build on their residentially zoned property have filed an appeal in the Second Appellate District, Division 6. They are asking the appellate court to remand this matter to the Trial Court for consideration of the merits of Appellants’ claims for inverse condemnation by way of a land-use analysis, to stay the proceedings to allow Appellants an opportunity to submit a government claim, to amend the pleadings to petition for a writ of mandamus, and to proceed forward to litigate this matter on the merits thereof. The questions presented in that appeal are:

1. Whether a complaining landowner states a valid cause of action for inverse condemnation sufficient to survive demurrer when the fundamental issue raised in his complaint involves land-use principles?
2. Whether principles of res judicata apply to a complaining landowner when his present lawsuit arises out of and is based on a land-use permit application that was filed by the complaining landowner, and denied by governmental agencies, after the last time the complaining landowner and the governmental agencies had engaged in litigation and when the issue of the denial of the land-use permit had not been previously litigated?
3. Whether a party to an action’s due process rights are violated by imposing principles of res judicata to that party by an extension of
   principles of privity when that party has never filed any previous action and when the primary relationship between the complaining
   parties is limited to their status as plaintiffs in the same lawsuit?
4. Whether a four year statute of limitations is applicable in an as applied challenge to a statute when the statute was enacted more than four years prior to the date of filing of the complaint, but less than four years after it was applied to the circumstance of the specific plaintiffs?

What all that legeleze means is that the appellant thinks the trial court judge didn’t base his decision on the right laws. After reading the appellant’s brief, I think he might have a point. It will be interesting to see what the appellate judge decides.

What this means for Cambria: we are getting closer to the day when a judge will decide the future of our community. To my mind, there are two alternatives: lift the moratorium allow property owners to build at 1% per year up to the wastewater treatment plant capacity of 5,250. (It will be 2040 at that point.) Or face the reality of paying for all those properties that the CCSD will not serve – with a price tag of at least $39,000,000, probably much, much more

More homes and more Cambrians means more money for services and facilities (like fire protection and parks). It also means more demand for those services and facilities. The property taxes on those new homes is likely to be much more than taxes on homes that haven’t been re-assessed for over a decade or two. And connection fees will help underwrite some of the urgent infrastructure improvements we apparently need. More people would mean more wear and tear on the roads and other facilities. There are always trade-offs for communities as they try to map their future.

Our community is protected from becoming a community of McMansions by the standards of the North Coast Area Plan and the Cambria Design Plan as well as the County ordinances that implement those policies.The County is making an effort to set policy that is in line with what the community wants. Its time to give that responsibility back to the County.