Marin Municipal Water
District is pushing back on a Marin County Civil Grand Jury report asserting
the agency nearly faced depleting its reservoirs this year because it had not
taken past steps to build a more resilient water supply.
The grand jury assessment
lacked credibility, included factual errors and is now being used to incite
more critique of the district’s handling of the drought last year, the district
Board of Directors said.
“It certainly was very
angry at the district for failing to do something,” board member Cynthia Koehler
said during a discussion on the report on Sept. 6. “But if you go through it,
they actually never had the courage or conviction to say what that thing should
have been.”
“The thing has been
weaponized, I can tell you that much,” board member Larry Bragman said of the
report.
The grand jury report came
after two winters of drought in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 threatened to deplete
local reservoirs as soon as mid-2022. Last year, the district prepared to build
an emergency $100 million pipeline across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge to
pump in Sacramento Valley water to prevent that outcome. The project was put on
hold after several large storms at the end of 2021 nearly refilled the
district’s seven reservoirs in the Mount Tamalpais watershed.
The grand jury report
recommended the district, which serves 191,000 residents in central and
southern Marin, create at least a four-year water supply. The district’s
reservoirs make up about 75% of its annual supply and have about a two-year
supply of water. The remainder of the district’s supply comes from Russian
River water imports from the Sonoma Water agency.
The district last faced
depleting local supplies in the 1976-1977 drought. After building a temporary
pipeline across the Richmond Bridge to avoid running out of water, the district
expanded its reservoir supplies by doubling the size of Kent Lake, its the
largest reservoir, and building the Soulajule Reservoir.
In a statement, grand jury
foreperson Pat Shepard said she had no further comment other than to say “the
report was investigated, written and approved by the 19-member 2021-2022 grand
jury and stands on its own.”
In its responses, the
water district noted that the western U.S. is going through a historic drought,
with the last 22 years being the driest in the past 1,200 years, according to a
study published by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“I would have liked to
have seen something that maybe stepped back and sort of explained the bigger
and more complex picture that California water management has become with
climate change,” board member Monty Schmitt said of the grand jury report.
The district’s response
stated that it “took all necessary and appropriate steps to assure continued
water service to its customers.”
These steps included
conservation incentives, water use restrictions, pursuing the pipeline project,
upgrading the Kastania Pump Station to increase the amount of Russian River
water it is able to import and creating a new agreement with Sonoma Water to
buy more water during high winter flows on the Russian River.
The district said it is
following many of the grand jury’s recommendations, including currently
studying a variety of new water supply options, including desalination, a
pipeline, expanding reservoir storage and new water supply possibilities with
Sonoma Water such as groundwater storage.
Kimery Wiltshire,
president of the Sausalito-based Confluence West nonprofit organization that
works on water issues in the West, said the previous 2012-2016 drought was a
wake-up call to water districts throughout California.
She said that MMWD “hit
the snooze button” and was the only water district in the Bay Area to require
drastic water cuts that impacted the economy and quality of life during the
drought.
“While other districts
kicked off water recycling, desalination, and reservoir projects, initiated
smart-metering, and adopted drought-resilient budget-based water rate
structures, Marin Water leaned mostly on asking ratepayers to conserve, hoping
for rain,” Wiltshire said.
Larry Minikes, a Marin
Conservation League board member and former member of the water district’s
citizens advisory committee, said the grand jury report did not acknowledge the
role that residents have played in rejecting new water supply projects such as
a desalination plant.
“When we have tried to
increase water supply — and I was part of that community back in 2000 — we
didn’t want to see it by an overwhelming margin,” Minikes told the board.
“Everyone was concerned about Realtors and growth and changing the character of
the community.
“Now we’re screaming
bloody murder — ‘Where the hell is our water?'” he said. “You’re damned if you
do, you’re damned if you don’t.”
Marin Independent Journal
Will Houston
September 13, 2022
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