Report: State building modernization plan lacks oversight, behind schedule

Good morning! TGIF. 

The $1.3 billion first phase of a project to build and modernize 11 state office buildings lacks adequate accountability and oversight and is behind schedule, according to a new report. 

The report, released by the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office on Wednesday, identified three areas of concern. First, LAO writes the administration’s strategy “lacks basic information necessary to determine its merits, including its costs, benefits, and potential alternative approaches.” 

Second, the LAO noted the administration’s insistence on using a particular funding process that allows “the administration to establish and fund projects without legislative approval” greatly reduces legislative oversight. 

The LAO also called the construction and renovation plan “ambitious,” adding it was already behind schedule and that it is likely to become increasingly more expensive.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “The U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department on Thursday over allegations that prosecutors and deputies withhold evidence and use jailhouse informants to illegally obtain confessions,” reports The Orange County Register. 

• “California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 54 last month, commanding the Legislature to be less sneaky by requiring 72 hours of public exposure for measures before their final votes. … The rules’ potential loophole is that they don’t require a 72-hour wait before a bill’s first floor vote in its first house by defining a bill’s “final form” – the words of Proposition 54 – as the version presented for a floor vote in the second house.” The Sacramento Bee has more. 

• “Poseidon Water hopes to help quench Orange County’s thirst, but first the company’s proposed desalination project must slake a thirst of its own. … But if Poseidon has its way, the $1-billion desalter it wants to build next door will simply take over use of the power station’s old intake pipe, which reaches roughly a quarter-mile into the ocean and is big enough for a tractor-trailer to drive through. Whether regulators allow Poseidon to do that will be the first major test of new state rules,” reports the Los Angeles Times.  

• “A bill that makes it easier for people to leave reviews on websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor without fear of being sued by businesses for sharing their opinion has become law,” writes The San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

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At an event held Monday at the oceanfront facility 30 miles north of San Diego, speakers praised the wisdom of the San Diego County Water Authority in teaming with project developer Poseidon Water in building the plant over the objections of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. They said the desal plant should inspire construction of similar facilities across drought-plagued California.

But Poseidon’s bid to build a $900 million desal plant in Huntington Beach shows that the drought hasn’t necessarily changed anything in terms of making the legal and regulatory obstacle course easier to navigate. As the OC Weekly points out, Poseidon has been trying to secure support and approval for the Orange County project for at least as long as it pursued the Carlsbad project, first proposing a design for a desal plant there in 1998.

How far have company officials gotten? An August story in the Orange County Register noted that there is not even established acceptance of the proposed location of the facility:

The push to look at other locations is reflective of a perception among anti-Poseidon activists that the company has foisted its project upon an unwitting public, that it’s proposing a plant no one asked for, and that the plant isn’t even needed in these times of conservation and water-use cutbacks. Recycling technologies are improving, they point out, and there’s talk of storing storm-water for later use as drinking water.

 

Poseidon has good reasons for locating its proposed plant near the AES power plant in Huntington Beach. There’s already an open ocean intake pipe at the location, a pipe used to bring in seawater to cool down the power plant.

Surfrider group: Orange County project ‘the worst offender’

While the California Coastal Commission ended up siding with Poseidon in approving the Carlsbad plant, it’s not clear if the commission is prepared to do the same with the Huntington Beach proposal. Environmentalists assert the desalination plant poses significant risks to offshore marine life in Orange County. The Surfrider Foundation’s Newport Beach chapter is leading the charge, calling the proposed project the most damaging yet proposed in California:

There are a number of desalination technologies, and if it is not done properly, the seawater intake process can unnecessarily kill marine life.  Desalination also produces a highly concentrated brine discharge that degrades water quality and marine life habitat if not properly diluted. …

 

There are numerous ocean desalination facilities being proposed in California, all in various stages of planning or permitting. Many of the proposed facilities have not been designed to minimize degradation to marine habitats and water quality, nor are the proposals being thoroughly evaluated by any government agency for their cumulative impacts statewide. The California State Water Resources Control Board is currently in the process of collecting scientific data on the adverse impacts of ocean desalination, and how best to minimize those impacts. But some proposals are moving forward without having adopted the recommendations of the science community – Poseidon’s project proposal is the worst offender.

Nevertheless, the project has bipartisan political support, and has begun to make the sort of process gains that Poseidon did with its Carlsbad proposal several years ago. The Los Angeles Times has details:

In May, the board of the Orange County Water District approved a non-binding term sheet with Poseidon to negotiate the price of water from the plant and to determine who would be responsible for various aspects of the project.

 

[Poseidon Vice President Scott] Maloni said he expects the Orange County district to negotiate a 50-year deal with Poseidon should the project be approved by the California Coastal Commission sometime in the spring.

 

A key part of the term sheet is that Poseidon must prove to the Orange County district that the Carlsbad plant can operate without a hitch for 90 consecutive days.

 

“We’re probably a year away from executing a final water purchase agreement [with the Orange County Water District],” Maloni said. “Carlsbad would be in operation for a good amount of time.”

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” Governor Brown said at a press event in the Sierra Nevada mountains. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action. Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order mandating substantial water reductions across our state.”

To combat the state’s ongoing drought, the governor has ordered the State Water Resources Control Board to implement a 25 percent reduction in water use by local water agencies. He’s also calling on water districts to adopt conservation pricing, a streamlined permitting process for water projects and an investment in new water infrastructure technologies.

“People should realize we are in a new era,” the governor said. “The idea of your nice little green lawn getting watered every day, those days are past.”

Water everywhere, but only fraction from the sea

While conservation is the key element of the state’s short-term drought response, those latter provisions of the governor’s plan have many Californians turning to desalination as a promising long-term solution to the state’s water needs.

“The Governor’s Executive Order issued today is consistent with the policy goals established in the state’s Water Action Plan and clearly demonstrates his commitment to developing new local water supplies including seawater desalination,” said Scott Maloni, vice-president of Poseidon Water, a water development company that specializes in desalination.

For hundreds of years, sailors have found ways to remove salt and other impurities from the earth’s salt water and turn it into drinking water. Today, that process has gone high-tech at more than 17,000 desalination plants in 150 countries around the world. According to the International Desalination Association, more than 300 million people use approximately 21.1 billion gallons of water produced from desalination every day.

However, outside of the Middle East, where desalination is a vital component of the region’s water portfolio, desalination is responsible for just a fraction of the world’s drinking water.

“Even with all of the water in Earth’s oceans, we satisfy less than half a percent of human water needs with desalinated water,” Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and author of the book, The World’s Water, pointed out to Scientific American. “The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy.”

As of 2013, the California Department of Water Resources estimated that desalinated water cost $2,000 an acre foot, or double the price of water from other sources. But, the high energy production costs aren’t stopping enterprising companies from entering the desalination market, rather it’s a lengthy and bureaucratic permitting process.

Desalination plants battle lengthy permitting process

Next year, a $1 billion desalination plant in Carlsbad is expected to come online and produce 50 million gallons per day — after years of permitting battles with city governments and state agencies.

“They went through seven or eight years of hell to get here,” Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, told the San Jose Mercury News last year. “But they stuck it out. They got it done. If it succeeds, it will encourage others to try. And if it fails, it will have a chilling effect.”

Poseidon Water, which spearheaded the Carlsbad Desalination Project, is now working to gain final approvals from the California Coastal Commission on a desalination plant in Huntington Beach that would also produce 50 million gallons per day.

“A streamlined permitting process will significantly help our proposed Huntington Beach project become a reality,” said Maloni of Poseidon Water. “We are looking forward to bringing this project before the Coastal Commission for their approval this year and finally bringing a drought-proof water supply to millions of coastal residents.”

If the company gains its final discretionary approval from the Coastal Commission, the plant is scheduled to be operational by 2018. That’s not soon enough, given the state’s dwindling water supplies. Earlier this year, the Orange County Water District announced its intention to buy all of the 56,000 acre-feet of water produced by the plant.

“Desalination should be front and center”

The longer the drought persists, the more likely parched water agencies will be to add desalination plants as a component of their water portfolios.

“While conservation is a must, looking at ways to overcome the obstacles that have thwarted previous efforts on desalination should now be front and center in the water deliberations,” writes Joel Fox, editor of Fox & Hounds Daily. “Proposals to desalinate water from the Pacific Ocean have run into environmental concerns and cost issues. … The thinking on the cost issue is changing, however, because of the severity of the drought, the increased value of water, and potential energy resources to make the process work.”

In order to change thinking about desalination, it will require overcoming challenges from environmentalists, who view desalination as a precursor to more development.

“If you’re going to do something like desal, you want to make sure you’re doing everything you can in terms of conservation, water recycling, water re-use,” Susan Jordan of the California Coastal Protection Network told KQED, “and you don’t want unsustainable development that just perpetuates your problem, or the state’s problem.”

So screams an online appeal by the Surfrider Foundation to its “powerful activist network,” which apparently is OK with the ocean being used for recreation but not for purposes of providing water usable by Orange County’s more than 3 million residents.

At its Nov. 13 meeting in Newport Beach, the state Coastal Commission will consider a challenge to plans by Poseidon Water to build a seawater desalination plant six miles up the road in Huntington Beach that will produce 50 million gallons of freshwater a day, enough to cover roughly 8 percent of the county’s needs.

Executives for Poseidon, a private company headquartered in Boston, with a  West Coast office in Carlsbad, say the Huntington Beach desal facility will be the largest,  most technologically advanced and most energy efficient not only in California, and not only in the United States, but in the entire Western Hemisphere.

The project has an estimated price tag of $899 million and the taxpayers of neither Huntington Beach, nor Orange County, nor the state of California will foot the bill. Instead, Poseidon will go to the bond market to finance the build.

It is because of the promise of increasing the supply of water to residents of the nation’s sixth-largest county, and because much of the cost will be borne by Poseidon, that the county’s 11 representatives in the state Legislature, Democrats and Republicans, recently sent a letter to the Coastal Commission backing the proposed desal plant.

What Surfrider’s fear-mongering ignores

But none of that matters to Surfrider, which thinks it knows better than Orange County’s 11 elected representatives in Sacramento how the commission should vote on the Huntington Beach desal project.

Indeed, Surfrider claims that Poseidon’s plant design for Huntington Beach “would set the lowest possible standards for protecting our coast and ocean.” The group frets that the proposed plant might “unnecessarily kill marine life.”

It warns that discharge of highly concentrated brine into the ocean “degrades water quality and marine life habitat if not properly diluted.” And it cautions that ocean desal is “the most energy-intensive and expensive water supply option in California.”

What may not be known to many, if not most, of those attending the Coastal Commission’s Nov. 13 meeting — that is, those who are not members of Surfriders’ “powerful activist network” — is that the plant design for Poseidon’s Huntington Beach desal plant that supposedly would set the “lowest possible standards” is almost identical to the design the commission previously approved for Poseidon’s Carlsbad desal plant.

As to the threat the Huntington Beach plant poses to marine life and habitat, Scripps Institution of Oceanography coastal engineer Scott Jenkins and marine biologist Jeffrey Graham concluded that “the science has demonstrated the effects of the desalination facility on the marine environment are benign.”

The amount of energy to produce enough desal water to meet a family’s need for a year is no more the energy need to run a refrigerator for a year. And the Orange County Water District estimates that desal water would increase residential water bills 7 percent in 2017, which works out to $3.50 on a $50 water bill.

Orange County’s state legislative delegation unanimously agreed, “The Huntington Beach Desalination Project is a critically needed and environmentally responsible solution to the county’s supply needs.”

It remains to be seen whether the unelected state Coastal Commission overrides the will of the county’s duly elected state representatives.