Watertight Approach to Managing Resources : Utilities: Unyielding Calleguas board makes decisions affecting 500,000 users. Some applaud its drought-protection efforts. Others criticize its way of doing business.

Howard Hamilton was trying hard to plead the sad case of the Pleasant Valley School District at a recent meeting of the Calleguas Municipal Water District board.

He stood in front of the five-member panel asking for a break--specifically a waiver of a debt the school district owes Calleguas in capital construction costs for Tierra Linda Elementary School.

“You need to know how serious trouble we’re in,” Hamilton said earnestly. He related a series of financial misfortunes: First there were building fees owed to the Camrosa Water District, then the school district discovered it owed fees to Calleguas as well, then those fees more than doubled from a rate hike in December, adding up to a debt of $24,528 to Calleguas.

“It just about floored us,” Hamilton said. “I don’t recall seeing notification of the rate hike.”

Five solemn faces stared back at him.

“That’s not an indictment of you people,” he hastened to add, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. “Somehow we never got the message. Maybe that’s our fault.”

Next Hamilton evoked heart-string-tugging images of young children running around a school so destitute it would not even be able to afford furniture.

The board remained unmoved. Patrick Miller, the chairman of the board and a member for 26 years, gave Hamilton a small, polite smile.

“We have made no exceptions to these fees in the past,” said Miller, a pleasant-faced and dapper man in a pale-blue sport jacket. “We feel we have to be consistent. We’re just being good business people. We don’t want to start a trend.”

Hamilton and three others from the school district filed from the room defeated.

Powerful, consistent and unyielding except when told to yield by the agency that controls it, the Metropolitan Water District, Calleguas is the largest water district in Ventura County. It delivers water to nearly 500,000 users, including the whole of the east county as well as Camarillo and Oxnard.

All five members of its Board of Directors are men, and four of them are in their 60s. They are paid $178 per meeting and usually meet at least twice a month.

Board members are elected by voters in general elections on even-numbered years to serve four-year terms, though they traditionally remain on the board much longer. Elections for two positions will be held this year, the three others in 1996.

The Calleguas service area is carved into five districts, and each district elects one of its residents to the board. Division 1 is Simi Valley. Division 2 is most of Thousand Oaks and Oak Park; Division 3 runs from the Conejo Grade to Newbury Park; Division 4 is most of Camarillo and part of Oxnard; Division 5 includes most of Oxnard and part of Camarillo.

Until recent years, Calleguas elections were rarely contested and most members stayed on the board considerably longer than one term. Board members are not afraid to characterize themselves as conservative--even cautious-- and they rarely disagree with each other, at least not contentiously.

“No one has ever raised their voice (in meetings),” Division 2 representative Jeffrey Borenstein said. “It just hasn’t happened. I’m delighted in the chemistry that exists on our board.”

Borenstein, 40, is the youngest member of the board. He was elected in November, 1992, after defeating incumbent L. B. (Les) Kovacs. Before that, the Thousand Oaks accountant had been the water district’s auditor for about a dozen years.

What the five members have most in common, other than age and gender, is a strong belief that without careful preparation, Ventura County faces a dry and dismal future.

“We will have another drought,” said Bill Seaver, 64, the board’s newest member. “There is no doubt of that. And we’re going to have earthquakes. We have got to do everything we can to make sure we keep a safe and reliable source of water coming into the district.”

Many of those who interact with the board on a regular basis say that there has been a change in its mind-set in the last five years, a turn toward a more proactive approach to water conservation.

“They are looking at water now as something different from the way they looked at it five years ago,” said Thousand Oaks Director of Public Works Don Nelson. “Before, I think they looked on their role as just the middleman between Metropolitan and the purveyors.”

When the drought hit in the late 1980s, Nelson said the board seemed to revise its way of thinking. Metropolitan cut water supplies to Calleguas and prices nearly doubled.

“I think they started to look at themselves not so much as a sub-agency of Met,” he said. “They began to look at ways to drought-proof the area. They are doing some marvelous things now. Ten to 15 years from now, people are going to look back and say, ‘These people really knew what they were doing.’ ”

Nelson pointed to several reclaimed water projects Calleguas is taking part in, using treated sewage water to irrigate median strips, parks, golf courses, and eventually home gardens. One project in Oak Park is near completion and two more are planned for Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks.

The Calleguas board also wins praise from John Foley, the chairman of the Metropolitan Water District’s 51-member board, for its development of reclaimed water facilities.

“They are one of the premiers in getting in there early on reclaimed water,” Foley said.

He also said the Calleguas directors showed foresight in using the North Las Posas Basin for underground storage. To encourage districts to prepare for future droughts, Metropolitan offers nearly 50% discounts on water for storage. Calleguas estimates the basin can hold up to 300,000 acre-feet of water. One acre-foot is enough water to fill the needs of two families for a year.

If there are criticisms of Calleguas, they focus mostly on high water costs. But even those complaints don’t frequently wind their way up the hill to the Calleguas offices, high above Olsen Road in Thousand Oaks. Since Calleguas merely delivers the water to smaller water agencies within the district, usually it is the subcontracting firms that get an earful from angry consumers.

Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton, who in 1991 asked the county’s grand jury to investigate Calleguas for failure to justify a 28% rate increase, said he has been frustrated with the district many times in the last decade.

“For some reason, they can raise the water rates and people don’t get mad at them,” Stratton said. “They get mad at us instead.”

He accused the board of going ahead in the past on major capital improvement projects without seriously seeking public input.

“Some of the surprises they’ve sprung on us,” Stratton said. “Over the years it has been amazing what they would do. They’d say, ‘Show up at our meeting and we’ll tell you about our $300-million capital plan.’ Without looking at it ahead of time, there would be no way for our staff to comment on it intelligently.”

The same determination that brings praise from Nelson draws criticism from Stratton.

“They take the attitude that we know what we have to do to bring you water and this is what we’re going to do to do it, at any cost. That’s frustrating,” he said.

But Stratton said he believes the current board is much improved over the boards of the 1970s and ‘80s. In particular, he said, having Ted Grandsen, a former Simi Valley mayor and county supervisor, serving on the board from Division 1 has made a difference.

“Ted brings a sensitivity to the concerns of those of us who are elected,” Stratton said. “He knows that we can get blamed when rates go up.”

Grandsen, 61, was handpicked by Vincent Hardy as his successor when Hardy retired from the Calleguas board in 1990. The Simi Valley native was then elected to the board in 1992. He is also on the Metropolitan board.

As a longtime nursery owner who now works for the Green Thumb nursery in Canoga Park, Grandsen said he brings to the board a certain sympathy toward the needs of agricultural water users, which include nurseries. But not too much sympathy.

When the water deliveries to farmers began, Grandsen said he heard from other nursery owners.

“I was called by a lot of people saying, ‘But we can’t cut back,’ ” he said. “And I’d say, ‘You’re part of agriculture, you’ve got to cut back.’ ”

Grandsen said Bill Seaver, who was appointed last year to fill the Division 5 spot of Carl Ward, who retired at 81, is most like him.

“We’re two political animals,” Grandsen said.

Seaver, a Camarillo resident who proudly refers to himself as a third-generation Californian, was superintendent of the Conejo Valley schools for 10 years. He was a teacher before that, and has lived in the county for 38 years.

He said he was fascinated with the topic of water rights since he was a child on a Hayward farm. In addition to reading “everything I can get my hands on” about water, he took pleasure trips to see the state water project and the Colorado River project.

When he heard the board was accepting applications to fill Ward’s spot, he submitted a resume. He said his background with the school district prepared him for dealing with big budgets--Calleguas has about a $40-million budget--and also gave him a good sense of how to work with people. Like Grandsen, he is jovial and friendly.

Donald Hauser, 62, also lives in Camarillo and represents District 3. He unseated incumbent Kurt Reithmayr in 1992 without putting up a single campaign sign or knocking on any doors.

As a civil engineer and former employee of the county’s Flood Control District, Hauser said he brings the perspective of having been “on the other side of the counter” to the board.

“I decided that there was only one thing I hadn’t tried and that was the political arena. I wanted to see if I could make some of the rules and regulations easier to deal with.”

Still sporting a crew cut from his military days, Hauser wears a tiny lapel pin that says “Calleguas” to board meetings. His fellow board members all admire his engineering expertise, which he said enables him to understand plans for Calleguas projects in “one glance.”

Board members heap praise on Chairman Patrick Miller, 63, an Oxnard resident who represents District 4, calling him “an encyclopedia of water for Ventura County,” respectful, fair and straight-laced.

Last year, Miller served for several months as acting chairman of the Metropolitan board, arguably the most powerful position in the Southern California water world.

“He fights very hard at Metropolitan to preserve Calleguas’ status and to represent their needs,” current Metropolitan Chairman Foley said.