Wouldn’t a regional effort toward more water availability make more sense than one small area trying to develop its own new water source, both from financial and physical points of view?
For example San Diego County is building a $1 billion desalination facility in Carlsbad. The water will be available to the whole county.
The city of Santa Barbara built a $100 million desal plant to deal with shortages created by climate change droughts. But, of course, with a much larger population and much larger tax base than Cambria.
The sustainable water facility can only produce a limited amount of water for the community of Cambria. How much water can be produced through recapture/recycling remains to be seen.
The ultimate cost to Cambria and the ability to get permits through both San Luis Obispo County and California Coastal Commission scrutiny remains to be seen. In any case, we will see the ultimate outcome sometime in the future as Cambria continues to develop its new facility and seeks approval.
At this point, we can only hope that the increased cost to current users will be affordable.
I discussed this letter with Donn Howell and he very much agrees with this point of view, and for that reason I am voting for Howell to sit on the Cambria Community Services District board.
Lee Bailey
Cambria
This article appears in Oct 11-21, 2018.