For more than four years, Steve Blois has been waiting, debating, and fighting for something near and dear to him and his fellow Lake Nacimiento shoreside residents: Who determines how they use the lake in their backyards?
“We want to protect recreational use of [the lake],” Blois said. “The fact of the matter is that no one owns that water except the people of California—you can permit what it’s used for, sure, but in the end that water isn’t any one person or group’s thing to lord over.”
Blois serves as the vice president of the Nacimiento Regional Water Management Advisory Committee, a group embroiled in a lawsuit with the Monterey County Water Resources Agency over the latter’s regulation of recreational lake use.
“It’s a very complicated issue,” Blois said with a sigh. “At the risk of oversimplifying, the best way to describe it is that we take issue with the way water is being regulated for use by Monterey County.”
This is not the first time these two parties have crossed paths, according to Blois, although he did note that it’s the first time he has been majorly involved with a lawsuit as the vice president.
In 1993, the Nacimiento advisory committee—which ultimately lost the suit—sued the Monterey County water agency, alleging that the agency was required by law to conduct an environmental review of its 1991 schedule for allocating water released from its dam.
The current lawsuit—filed by the Nacimiento advisory committee in January 2019—has been twice delayed. First because of the COVID-19 pandemic, then due to a judge’s order to have the lawsuit looked at by the California State Water Resources Control Board for a thorough report on the management of the lake’s water.
“Some background information that might be important to know is that in the 1960s [Monterey County] farmers paid for the construction of the dam that is used to help manage the water level at the lake,” Blois said.
Since then, farmers have paid a tax on their property that enables them to use Nacimiento’s water—all of this is permitted by the state water board, which determines how much water can be used for different purposes.
The water board compiled the report that led to a Sept. 26 lawsuit hearing in Paso Robles, where the judge who’s now presiding over the case did not accept the findings of the report.
“When the report was completed, there were some things we agreed with and some things we did not,” Blois said. “We believe that the county of Monterey wanted the judge to accept the report.”
The judge argued that the report’s data—which included stats on the water levels, water drainage and overall water content after winter storms—didn’t support the conclusion that Monterey County hasn’t ignored the recreational use of the lake as it has claimed.
New Times reached out to Monterey County for a comment on the ruling and received a statement from county Communications Director Nicholas Pasculli.
“I wish we could provide some details,” Pasculli said. “However, litigation is pending, and we do not have a comment at this time.”
San Luis Obispo County’s legal counsel clarified the county’s role in the following statement:
“The county of San Luis Obispo is not a party to that lawsuit, as the lake is owned by the Monterey County Water Resources Agency,” a spokesperson said. “But we are actively monitoring the case, as the lake is located within the county, and the county’s Nacimiento Pipeline Project uses water from the lake as well.”
As a result of the Sept. 26 hearing, the case is at a somewhat new starting point, according to Blois. Monterey’s water agency and the Nacimiento committee were ordered to confer and determine what specific issues they wanted to bring to the table at the next hearing on Nov. 17.
“He effectively ordered both parties to come back and present evidence of our alleged issues,” Blois said. “The big thing with that is just how long it is going to take due to how complicated the issues at hand are.”
Part of the long process of determining those issues, according to Blois, is engaging in the discovery part of the lawsuit. Each side will have the chance to ask about the evidence the other side will present in the case, he said.
“This will happen for both sides, so, for example, if the county has a hydraulics expert they want to call as a witness, our attorneys will sit them down and ask them about their experience, what they might cover, etc., etc.,” Blois said.
As the November hearing approaches, Blois is hopeful that the Nacimiento Regional Water Management Advisory Committee will emerge victorious in a way that also ensures that Monterey County can still make use of the water it’s permitted to use.
“Ninety-eight percent of residents on the lakefront cannot use the lake right next to them, and if they do, they have to go on a boarding ramp on the other side of the lake,” he said.
Blois said that this is not the first time the two parties have conferred like this during the lawsuit process—and it’s unlikely to be the last—but he said he does hope that this time they will be able to reach new ground and move the whole case forward.
“We want them to have their other uses of water; we don’t want to take that away from them, and we do want them to recognize that [we locals] have a right to recreationally use water by our properties,” he said. “We want to work with them—we do—but it does take two to tango.” Δ
Reach Staff Writer Adrian Vincent Rosas at arosas@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Oct 5-12, 2023.
Adrian, This battle will continue for decades to come without a resolution that will be appealing to the Nacimiento residents. Monterey County will always be in first position for the use of the lake that their farmers paid to create and continue to fund through taxes. 2023 was a great year for the residents for obvious reasons, but the dry spells are coming and the residents will continue to see the lake dry up during those years. This situation is a microcosm of what’s to come throughout CA, the USA & the World as we know it!! We’re heading into what I would call a water war era. Many places are already there.