Water District Pulled Into Vortex of Controversy : Politics: The Lee Lake agency used to get little attention. But the growth of Riverside County has spurred it into action, and some longtime residents are fighting its plans.

For almost 25 years, a little-known water district that covers much of the Temescal Valley in Riverside County sat idle with few assets, little overhead and no customers.

The Lee Lake Water District, which spans 8,400 acres of rural land along Interstate 15 between Corona and Lake Elsinore, didn’t even have rights to its namesake body of water.

Now, with unprecedented residential growth projected for the next two decades in the valley, the water district has come to life. In the past two years, the district has begun a series of large capital projects to provide water and sewers to new neighborhoods.

But a group of longtime residents and landowners views the burgeoning water agency with confusion and suspicion. For the first time in 18 years, three seats on the water district board will be challenged when incumbents face reelection today.

The opponents say that many who live in the area already have their own wells or septic tanks, and they see little need for even having a water district, much less paying a share of the higher costs to run it.

“The only water they can bring me is to bring it in a bucket,” said William Howard, who lives on a small lot near Glen Ivy and who is helping the campaign to oust the current board members.

“I never even knew Lee Lake Water District existed,” Howard said. “Nobody ever paid any attention to it.”

Even so, the water board increased the fees to pay for running the expanded district, said John Pastore, the district’s general manager. The operating budget is up to $550,000 this year; it was next to nothing several years ago, he said. In addition, the district is seeking to take out an $800,000 bond to provide reserves for emergency situations.

“Before there wasn’t anything going on,” he said. “It’s like overnight someone flicked a switch. . . . Now our budget is much larger.”

District officials say having the option of water or sewer service, or both, will benefit all landowners.

Even more, district officials say, the increased cost reflects the reality of urban sprawl in western Riverside County, the fastest-growing area of the state in the past decade.

When the district was formed in 1965, the grassy, rolling hillsides in the valley were inhabited primarily by citrus farms and mining operations. At the time, several of the landowners saw that the area eventually would need domestic water and sewer service. So they created the Lee Lake District.

It was not until the late 1980s that several land developers formed large-scale development plans.

To meet the new demand, the water district embarked on a plan to construct pumping stations, storage reservoirs and transmission mains, as well as an initial, $8.5-million phase of a water reclamation facility, which can handle 900,000 gallons of sewage per day.

Several projects, including the sewage facility, have already been completed to serve 3,000 new homes in the Wildrose Ranch and Mountain Cove developments, which are being built just north of Glen Ivy, Pastore said. But the downturn in the economy slowed home sales, and so far only 10 customers have hooked up to the Lee Lake District.

Frank Johnson, a board candidate who owns the JBJ citrus ranch, and about 25 other landowners with a total of 3,500 acres are attempting to break away from the district and join the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District. The landowners say it would cost a lot less to get sewer and water connections if they annex to Elsinore Valley, which has closer water lines and sewer capacity.

“I don’t think the small landowners have really been taken into consideration,” Johnson said.

For now, all attention is on the election. Under a state law regulating certain water districts and their elections, each $1 of the assessed value of a landowner’s property gives the owner one vote, Pastore said. Opponents say the process favors Foothill Properties and two other developers, Costain Homes and UDC Homes, which together can control a majority of the votes. Overall, the district has about 2,000 landowners.

Current board members call much of the talk “election rhetoric” but concede that with more residents, it was a challenge bound to happen.