The Marin Municipal Water
District has failed to adequately prepare for severe drought and should create
a four-year water supply, the Marin civil grand jury said in a new report.
Last year, the district
faced depleting local reservoir supplies as soon as summer 2022. While rains in
late 2021 nearly refilled reservoirs, the drought “exposed serious
shortcomings” in the district’s ability to offer a reliable water supply and
has shaken public confidence in the district’s leadership, the report states.
“Last year’s drought
emergency could have been avoided, if MMWD had taken sufficient measures to
provide for a resilient water supply,” the report stated. “With the mounting
challenges posed by climate change, the mistakes of the past cannot be
repeated. MMWD must establish a roadmap for achieving water supply resilience
without delay.”
The grand
jury report calls on the district to increase its water supply by 10,000 to
15,000 acre-feet and consider a variety of sources, including new supply,
conservation and recycled water expansion. The amount is about a 20% increase
in the district’s maximum water supply and a volume equatable to a new Nicasio
Reservoir.
The district’s seven
reservoirs in the Mount Tamalpais watershed hold about 80,000 acre-feet, which
is just more than two years’ worth of supply. Additionally, the grand jury is
calling on the district to prioritize new water supply options and how it would
pay for them before the end of this year.
Before the rains in late
2021, the district had been preparing to build an emergency $100 million,
8-mile pipeline across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge by summer 2022 to pump in
Yuba County water.
In March, the district
began a study that will assess the cost and benefits of potential new water
supply options to serve the county’s 191,000 central and southern residents,
including a pipeline, a regional desalination plant, recycled water expansion,
groundwater banking and additional conservation measures.
District General Manager
Ben Horenstein said the grand jury’s recommendations align with the current
actions the board is taking to find new sources of supply.
“I think it’s a thoughtful
report, a good report and again I think it is a direction we’re going consistent
with the recommendations,” Horenstein said.
He pushed back on the
grand jury’s findings that the district failed to adequately prepare,
describing them as “opinions.” He said the district has done a good job in its
water supply planning and that it is not alone among western water suppliers in
preparing for emergency supply projects during the drought.
“I think the context of
the historic nature of the drought wasn’t clear in the report,” Horenstein
said. “To me, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to blame the district or to
blame anyone versus supporting the direction that is laid out in the report
that is consistent with what we’re currently doing.”
District board President
Larry Russell said the report was helpful and that the district board should be
able to identify some priority projects by the end of the year.
At the same time, Russell
said the report showed some naiveté about the severity of the drought. He
pointed to a peer-reviewed study published earlier this year that found the
last 22 years in the western U.S. were the driest in 1,200 years.
“If a water district were,
in their terms, to drought-proof itself — I don’t even know what those words
mean, drought-proof,” Russell said, referring to the grand jury report. “What
does it mean technically? How much reserve do you need? How long is the drought
going to be?”
Kimery Wiltshire,
president of the Sausalito-based Confluence West nonprofit organization that
works on water issues in the western U.S., said she agreed with the grand jury findings
that the district’s two-year supply of water is “completely inadequate.”
The proposed $100 million
emergency pipeline was a “knee-jerk reaction” that frustrated East Bay
residents and could have been avoided had the district increased water supplies
in preceding decades.
“Marin I think is behind
the times,” Wiltshire said. “Most water agencies have a minimum operating
standard that they have identified and have in place at least four years of
supply.”
Wiltshire also agreed with
the grand jury’s criticism of the district using historical precipitation
levels to predict future reservoir levels. The grand jury states a 2017 plan
adopted by the district that predicted no shortages for projected water demand
through 2040 under climate change conditions is erroneous.
“The practice of relying
on historical precipitation to predict the future has proven to be flawed in
light of climate change,” the report states. “In fact, the possibility of
reservoirs running dry is much higher than anticipated.”
The district’s new supply
assessment is using models to stress-test the district’s water supply under
different scenarios, including more severe six- to seven-year droughts.
Larry Minikes, a former
member of the district’s citizen advisory committee and a Marin Conservation
League board member, said the grand jury’s recommendations on new supply are
valid. However, he said the report failed to capture the historical context
behind the district’s supplies, namely the county’s reticence to more housing
development.
“Marin for decades has been
concerned with population growth,” Minikes said. “Increases in water supplies
were seen as the enemy, as bringing in new development. Here we are today and
we’re saying, well why didn’t the district do more? The grand jury should have
brought into this the role the community played in getting where we are today.
The district was not operating in a vacuum.”
The district’s seven
reservoirs make up about 75% of its supply, with the remaining 25% coming from
Russian River water imports from the Sonoma Water agency. The district has not
expanded reservoir supplies since constructing the Soulajule Reservoir and
nearly doubling the size of Kent Lake, its largest reservoir, in the 1980s.
Another issue is how the
district would pay for these projects. The grand jury report states the
district has $139 million in outstanding bond debt and has the capacity to
raise another $150 million for water resilience projects so long as it
increases rates and fees to keep up with inflation and recent water revenue
losses.
Roger Roberts, a former
district water rate advisory committee member and former longtime Marin
Conservation League board member, said the district is already facing a
“serious financial bind” after the pandemic and the drought. In addition to the
water supply projects, he said the district has hundreds of millions of dollars
in deferred maintenance to repair and replace aging pipes, pumps, storage tanks
and other facilities.
Additionally, the district
has also had to spend down reserve funds to make up for losses in water sales
revenue incurred during the pandemic and drought as well as planning for the
emergency pipeline, he said.
Huge reservoir near Bay
Area could be expanded to store more water
George Russell: Marin
exceeds state water saving goals
“It means the water rates
will need to go up substantially,” Roberts said. “They have prided themselves
over the years for providing water at one cent a gallon. As a result of that,
this financial problem that has been building up on them is now front and
center.”
One avenue the grand jury
recommended is a new fee similar to the capital maintenance fee approved in
2019. The fixed fee is charged based on the size of the customer’s meter, with
larger meters corresponding with larger fees.
The fee is being
challenged in court by the Coalition for Sensible Taxpayers, known as COST,
which states that the fee is a tax and therefore requires voter approval. COST
alleges the fee violates the voter-approved Proposition 218 from 1996, which
prohibits government agencies from charging more for a service than it costs to
provide it.
“Whatever portion of that
which comes from ratepayers must be tied to the amount of their water usage,”
COST executive director Mimi Willard wrote in an email. “Charging people based
on the size of their meter is unfair, removes any incentive to conserve and we
believe is illegal.”
Marin Independent Journal
Will Houston
June 21, 2022
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