Judge to Hear Arguments Over Underground Water Plan : Courts: Calleguas district wants to store millions of gallons for emergency use. But the Moorpark-area landowners are opposed.

A Ventura County Superior Court judge will hear arguments today on whether a project to store millions of gallons of drinking water underground violates state environmental laws.

The case pits a Moorpark-area farm family against the Calleguas Municipal Water District. The district wants to install wells on the farm, to pump water underground and save it for use during a drought or an earthquake.

Representatives of the water district say they are simply trying to make sure that their customers have a reliable water supply. The district serves Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Oxnard, Camarillo and surrounding unincorporated areas.

But Glen M. Reiser, an attorney representing landowners Joseph and Mary Viramontez, said Calleguas “very effectively excluded . . . the general public from any meaningful scrutiny of a significant public project--a project with tremendous population growth implications in Ventura County.”

Reiser will ask Judge Barbara A. Lane to rule that the water district violated the California Environmental Quality Act by failing to notify the landowners of the project and failing to prepare a full report on the project’s environmental impact.

The Viramontezes said they first heard about the plan in January, almost a year after Calleguas first identified their land as a site for the project. They contend that that was too late to stop the plan.

They also say the project would encourage development and should therefore be subject to a full environmental review.

But the Viramontezes are not opposed to all development. They had planned to divide their 20 acres for development into four “orchard home” sites.

The California Environmental Quality Act requires preparation of an environmental impact report for all projects that will have a substantial effect on the environment.

In this case, however, the Viramontezes and Calleguas disagree over the scope of the project and what its impact will be.

The Viramontezes say they are fighting a massive $20-million project to install 25 wells and create 300,000 acre-feet of underground storage capacity for water. There are 326,000 gallons in one acre-foot, enough to supply a family of five for one year.

Calleguas now delivers about 100,000 acre-feet of water each year, serving about three-quarters of Ventura County’s 700,000 residents.

Reiser argues that the additional water storage capacity will greatly increase the likelihood “that Ventura County could ever become another Orange County, or some other suburban extension of Los Angeles County.”

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Calleguas defines the contested project differently, saying it is only a $2-million project to build four wells with 30,000 acre-feet of storage capacity. Although the district has plans to build at least 20 more wells, they are not on the Viramontez property and constitute a separate and distinct project that will be subject to a full environmental impact review, district officials said.

Reiser says Calleguas is illegally trying to divide the project into “environmentally insignificant segments.”

But Calleguas General Manager Donald R. Kendall argues that, even if the storage project is taken as a whole, the effect is not to encourage growth, but to accommodate current residents and development that is already projected. He said the ground-water storage is needed to protect 500,000 county residents from going thirsty if their primary source of water--from a mile-long, eight-foot-diameter tunnel--is sheared in an earthquake.

“Every time there’s an aftershock, my mind gets going,” Kendall said. “We’re trying to take care of the people who are already here.”

The 300,000 acre-feet of water, Kendall said, would be stored for emergencies rather than used each year to serve additional residents.

Whether the final result of the underground storage project is drought-proofing or development, both sides agree that the approval process is riddled with illogic.

Reiser wrote in a legal brief that it is wrong that responsibility for such important decisions rests with Calleguas.

“Here, the agency deciding that it will facilitate the tripling of the current population of Ventura County and the related traffic, congestion, smog, noise, residential and commercial development, and loss of open space is not the County Board of Supervisors,” he wrote. “The lead agency is, in fact, a parochial special district, which is concerned only with meeting water service needs.”

He also argued in the brief that the only notification the public received about the project were two “meaningless” newspaper ads “with no reference to the purpose and intended scope of Calleguas Municipal Water District’s multimillion-dollar ground-water project.”

Kendall, for his part, said it is ironic that the strongest environmental opposition to the project on anti-development grounds comes from landowner Joseph Viramontez.

In an interview, Viramontez said he has no objection to Calleguas’ installing as many noisy wells as it pleases, as long as they are not on the property he wants to develop.

Said Viramontez: “My initial hope would be that they would just leave me alone and put their wells anywhere else.”