The San Simeon Community Services District board unanimously voted to begin the process of dissolution during a special meeting on Friday, March 15.
Since December, the district has weighed its options—whether it should divest a portion of the services it provides, which include water, wastewater, roads, streetlighting, and waste management; dissolve altogether; or push forward into the future.
On March 15, the Community Services District’s (CSD) contracted legal counsel, Nubia Goldstein from White, Brenner LLP, said the board had two routes to consider. Both involved giving up local governing control, “giving up that government power, in essence to be taken over by a different government.”
“We need to know which route the board would like to focus on,” Goldstein told the board. “We’ve reached a fork in the road. We need to pick one road or the other to move forward.”
Board Vice Chair Karina Tiwana said that she’d thought about the issue a lot, but didn’t elaborate on what those thoughts were. Board member Michael Donahue called the decision they had to make “kind of a step back in terms of local control.”
Once the decision is made, interim CSD General Manager Patrick Faverty added, then things go through a very specific process with the SLO Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) guiding the way and playing the middle man.
“For 50 years, this district has not been able to keep up with its needs for future growth. … This is 40 years of failure to not keep the district current,” Faverty added. “We can’t even have a full board here because of some of the decisions we’ve made in the past.”
Currently, the district’s board is missing its fifth member. The four members currently serving on the board were appointed rather than elected. With fewer than 200 registered voters in the CSD and a board that’s split into representing five districts of about 30 to 40 voters each, Faverty told New Times that it’s been difficult to find people willing to serve on the board.
Faverty added that the district needs to build a new wastewater plant and the infrastructure to support that plant, take out the existing plant, and repair the land to its original condition; needs to replace old water connections and meters; and has a handful of other projects it needs to tackle. The choice to keep operating and improve things is a tough one, he said, because there’s no way for the district to add capacity through growth and many of the district’s residents are low income, so it would be hard to raise the rates.
“The struggle here was that the district was already past the position of being able to sort this all out,” he said.
Some residents disagree. One resident who spoke during public comment asked why the district wasn’t applying for grants to help pay for the projects it needed to tackle and wondered why written public comment that was submitted prior to the meeting wasn’t included in the agenda packet.
San Simeon resident and former CSD board member Gwen Kellas accused the board of not doing enough outreach before making a decision of this magnitude and only discussing the issue during board meetings, which not many people attend, “especially on a Friday night.”
“You’re ignoring the biggest stakeholder, and that’s the community,” she said. “Whatever decision you make is going to impact the entire community.”
Tiwana responded by saying that “no personal statements are to be made during public comment.”
“There is not an individual here that deserves to be attacked in any personal way,” she said. “That’s it, I’m ready to vote.”
With that, the board voted 4-0 without discussion to direct staff to prepare a resolution of application for dissolution to LAFCO, which means the issue will come back before the CSD’s board.
Faverty told New Times that it will take time to collect everything the district needs for the application and the next steps include speaking with the county about whether it would be willing to take over and provide services to San Simeon. He said the CSD will continue to operate as usual and even take steps to work on some of the projects it has in the hopper. Δ
This article appears in Spring Arts Annual 2024.
LAFCO/SLO taxpayers should strongly oppose this move. These people made their bed, now sleep in it. Issue large assessments to pay for their own damn fiscal irresponsibility, not the rest of SLO taxpayers.