Oxnard School Will Get City Water : Utilities: LAFCO reverses earlier vote and approves annexation to Calleguas district. Concern over ground supplies cited.

Swayed by concerns about preserving ground-water supplies, a state agency on Wednesday reversed an earlier vote and decided to allow the new Oxnard High School to hook up to city water.

The Local Agency Formation Commission voted 4 to 1 in favor of annexing the new school site to Calleguas Municipal Water District, which supplies water to the city of Oxnard.

The decision overturned LAFCO’s 3-2 vote in November, when a majority of commissioners rejected the annexation request because the school is being built in the center of an agricultural area west of the Oxnard city limits.

On Wednesday, Commissioners Maria VanderKolk and Robert N. McKinney changed their earlier votes to join John K. Flynn and Alex Fiore in the majority supporting the request.

Only LAFCO Chairman Larry Rose held fast to his previous vote against pumping city water to the new school, which is on Gonzalez Road near Victoria Avenue.

Prior to the vote, Fiore exhorted his fellow commissioners not to force the Oxnard Union High School District to drill a well to supply the new school’s water as a punishment for building in an agricultural area.

“They did what they did,” Fiore said. “The school is there. Are we going to stand here and be ridiculous and say ‘Tear down this school and we’ll give you a purified source of water?’ ”

In their initial decision in November, commissioners said they were concerned that piping city water to the new school would encourage further development on the agricultural fields surrounding the site. To avoid this possibility, the board ruled Wednesday that no other property owner can get water from the pipes that will hook the school to Calleguas.

In addition, commissioners required that the pipes to the school site be no larger than what is required to serve the school.

Calleguas gets its water from the Metropolitan Water District, which buys water from the state.

Oxnard school officials had argued that well water would be a less reliable and lower-quality water source for the school, which is scheduled to open in January to replace the existing Oxnard High School on 5th Street.

School officials have also said they believe that piping in city water would be cheaper than operating their own well, although some LAFCO commissioners say ground water may be far cheaper.

But it wasn’t primarily arguments about finances, water quality or the reliability of well water that prompted McKinney and VanderKolk to reverse their earlier decisions.

Rather, both commissioners said they had changed their votes after hearing comments from the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency, which regulates ground water supplies in the Oxnard Plain. Fox Canyon officials told commissioners that they strongly recommend annexing the school to Calleguas to avoid an additional drain on the area’s ground-water supplies.

Despite changing his vote, McKinney said he is still upset that school officials applied for the hookup to Calleguas after they had already begun building on the 50-acre school site.

“I still don’t like the process the school district followed any more than I did the last time we talked about this,” he said.

And VanderKolk said after the meeting that she felt she had no choice but to reverse her earlier decision. “We really do want to try to protect our ground-water reserves as much as possible,” she said.

Rose said he also sympathizes with Fox Canyon’s concerns about ground-water supplies, but he said LAFCO’s primary duty is to enforce county planning guidelines.

“The ground-water management agency has its directives of conserving water and we have ours to preserve the agricultural land,” he said.

And Rose said he opposed the Calleguas annexation because he believes the school could save money by drilling water from the ground.

“They didn’t really have the numbers there to convince me that the ground-water solution wasn’t the right way to go,” Rose said after the meeting.

To hook up to Calleguas, Rose said, the school district will have to pay about $1.2 million upfront, which is $900,000 more than the estimated cost for the district to drill a well and install a purification system with water tanks.

After paying these one-time charges, the yearly fees for Calleguas water would cost the district about $70,000 a year, Rose said.

In contrast, the annual charges for drawing well water would run up to $22,000 per year, although this amount could increase if the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency raised its surcharges.