San Diego needs a desalination advocate on the Coastal Commission; Desalination a key to coastal water strategy, says editorials

From the San Diego Union Tribune, a pair of editorials regarding desalination. From the first editorial:

For San Diego County, the single most important issue falling under the legal jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission is desalination of ocean water. Today the region is perilously dependent on unreliable supplies of imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River. Desalination offers the promise of an inexhaustible new source of water to address San Diego’s future needs.

For this reason, the current vacancy on the Coastal Commission is of critical importance to San Diego. It is up to Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, to fill the position, one of two San Diego seats on the 12-member panel. Under state law, Bass will choose from a list of seven names submitted by the Board of Supervisors and a selection committee of local mayors.

It is absolutely essential, in our view, that Speaker Bass appoint a commissioner who will advance the cause of desalination in an environmentally sound way. The only seawater desalination plant thus far approved in San Diego, Poseidon Resources’ Carlsbad project, took six long years to clear state regulatory hurdles. The Coastal Commission, with a staff openly hostile to the venture, did much to delay it before ultimately approving it.

Which of San Diego’s candidates for the position on the California Coastal Commission be an advocate for desalination? Find out what the U-T thinks by clicking here.

Now, after Poseidon finally received approval after six years of working on the approval process, there’s another desalination plant on the horizon:

The County Water Authority, meanwhile, has completed a feasibility study on building a 150-million-gallon-a-day, $1.9 billion desalination plant in Camp Pendleton’s southwest corner. This is a highly promising venture. It’s easy to see why water experts are excited over the proposal, which has the potential to fill the water needs of one-third of San Diego County homes all by itself. Especially if new technologies can be developed to lessen the relatively minor harm done to marine life by the water intake valves needed for big desalination plants, San Diego could be on the leading edge of a new water era.

Unfortunately, there are two huge obstacles to this hopeful vision. The first is the nearly unconditional opposition to desalination by many environmental groups. Some appear to have a pragmatic understanding that desalination is a key to the state’s long-term water strategy and solely want practical mitigation efforts. But for many, starting with Food & Water Watch, a Naderite nonprofit group, desalination amounts to an evil plot to simultaneously discourage conservation, kill off fish and promote corporate control of natural resources. Such groups and their high-paid lawyers will never stop fighting.

And they will be helped by the second big obstacle: the lack of a transparent, easily navigated bureaucratic process by which desalination projects can prove their viability and win state approval. The reason it took Poseidon six years to get the final go-ahead was that it needed input from or the endorsement of at least a dozen government agencies.

Read more of this editorial from the San Diego Union Tribune by clicking here.

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