It’s been more than two years since Cambria applied to turn its emergency water system into a more permanent fixture, but there’s been little progress since then.
According to Cambria Community Services District (CCSD) board member Harry Farmer, the permit application was submitted to the county in July 2020.
“We still have no idea when the application will finally go before the planning department,” Farmer said.
The county Department of Planning and Building told New Times that the delay is in part due to environmental issues that still need to be looked into.
“Based on the applicant’s latest update to the county in June 2022, they are consulting with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other natural resource agencies to obtain concurrence on biological opinion, which is key to address the county’s local coastal program policies,” the department wrote in an email.
Cambria’s water issues have been ongoing for more than a decade, but the problems with the now-proposed water reclamation facility started in 2014, after the district declared a water supply emergency. Due to a dire water shortage situation, SLO County proceeded to grant the CCSD an emergency permit to build a water supply project, bypassing the typical requirements needed to obtain an operating permit. The catch? The district could only use the water during that particular water supply emergency.
After the emergency declaration was lifted, Cambria wanted to continue using the facility but couldn’t. The CCSD has been fighting an uphill battle ever since, trying obtain the necessary permits to operate the facility full time. If the county approves the district’s coastal development permit to operate a water reclamation facility, the application will then go before the California Coastal Commission, which will ultimately decide whether to approve the permit.
“We’ve been asked by both the CCSD and the county to weigh in on various aspects of the proposal over the past few years but haven’t heard anything recently about the status of the application,” Coastal Commission Senior Environmental Scientist Tom Luster told New Times via email.
Farmer said that one of the major project delays is a lawsuit that the community services district filed against CDM Smith, a engineering and construction firm that the CCSD hired to construct the water reclamation facility. The lawsuit alleges that the district lost $2.5 million with the construction of a defective brine pond and was forced to decommission the facility because of the company’s flawed reports. While the CCSD settled with CDM Smith in January 2021, Farmer said, it lost precious time and money that could’ve been put toward the permit application.
“So we won the suit, but it took a lot of time, a lot of effort. And so this project has been a serious problem since the beginning of building it,” he said. “We still have more than 10 years [left] to pay $660,000 a year for a facility that basically hasn’t even operated yet.”
According to previous New Times reporting, the application is on hold in part due to several inaccuracies in the project’s draft environmental impact report released in August 2020.
CCSD General Manager John Weigold said that many residents who speak up during district board meetings seem to believe that the CCSD didn’t submit a complete application to the county.
“That’s a bunch of malarkey,” Weigold said. “We submitted a full application. It’s the county that asked us for more information. So that’s where we are, and some of the information that they asked for is pretty complex.”
But according to the county Department of Planning and Building, the application is far from being finished—officials told New Times via email that the CCSD still has to complete a instream flow study, pumping tests with monitoring, groundwater modeling, an updated wetland delineation, and biological assessment.
Weigold said that the CCSD is working with the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife to complete that biological assessment.
“We have to go out and get consultants to do a long-term study on the impact, and it takes a long time,” Weigold said. “It’s not the kind of study that you can put together in a week or two, or even a few months. Some of these studies take up to a year more, and we have no control over an organization like the Army Corps.”
Weigold added that he hopes to see the study completed within the next two months, adding that there’s no guarantee that it’ll be done that quickly.
Tensions between the Coastal Commission, the county, and the CCSD have been strained for the past few years over the water facility, but also regarding approval of several coastal development permits (CDPs) for single-family residential projects in the town. Earlier this year, the Coastal Commission sent the county Department of Planning and Building a letter asking the county to stop approving additional project permits.
“The county, as the initial CDP decision-making body for CDP applications that include new water use in Cambria, needs to consider these perhaps inconvenient facts, and stop approving or even considering such projects unless and until measurable steps are taken that improve water supply issues in Cambria,” Coastal Commission Director Dan Carl wrote in a letter to the county. “The county should not be even accepting applications for development in Cambria that cannot show evidence of an adequate water supply.”
Groundwater studies done in March by Todd Groundwater, an environmental consultant, examined the feasibility of the water reclamation facility. The study reported that the water facility would be able to achieve water conservation goals in varying degrees of drought as long as groundwater conditions were kept within certain parameters.
“This could offer CCSD customers a choice between cutting back even further on water use or paying for expensive [sustainable water facility] water,” the study concluded.
So when will the facility finally open? Weigold says he isn’t sure.
“In all likelihood it’s very possible that once the county gives us a permit, it’ll be appealed by either another entity like the Coastal Commission,” Weigold said, “or it’s potentially appealed by someone else, a private individual.” Δ
Reach Staff Writer Shwetha Sundarrajan at shwetha@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 10-20, 2022.
This article carefully reports the application process by Cambria Community Services District (CCSD) for a permanent Coastal Development Permit for the Wastewater Treatment Facility (EWS/WRF).
As one of the Malarkey Group of “private individuals” described by CCSD General Manager Weigold in the article, I am so pleased that many Cambrians pay careful attention to the ecological and environmental aspects of projects.
The EWS/WRF project will not only cost $20 million overall by 2034. It also comes as the climate crisis, ongoing drought, intensified fire danger in a forested town, and exorbitantly increasing costs of private property residences–with consequent decreases in homes for many people–already confront us.
We all must pay wider attention to the effects of manipulating Earth as if it were full of infinite resources for wealthy interests exclusively.
Elizabeth Bettenhausen
full time resident of Cambria for 20 years