Praise Flows Freely at Water Plant’s Debut

Built for one-third the expected cost, a $9.3-million water treatment plant that promises cleaner, fresher water for much of Ventura and the Ojai Valley opened to about 400 visitors Thursday.

The invited guests received free baseball caps and water bottles, courtesy of the Casitas Municipal Water District, before touring the plant at the base of Casitas Dam.

They munched on chicken and meatballs beneath a tent decorated with blue and white balloons while a country band played. And the Nordhoff High School marching band led a parade of dignitaries up rural Casitas View Road to herald the beginning of festivities.

“This is a first,” said state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo) after stepping from the convertible he rode along the parade route. “I waved to a lot of gophers, squirrels and cattle. We worked on the canine vote, too.”

But the pomp and circumstance provided an appropriate backdrop for water district officials to gush about the Marion R. Walker Pressure Filtration Plant, named after an 83-year-old former board member who stepped down in 1990 after serving 17 years.

“We’re real proud of this plant,” district General Manager John Johnson said. “It’s the biggest plant in Ventura County in terms of capacity and it’s also the most economical plant to be built in Ventura County.” The plant will deliver water to 60,000 west Ventura County residents.

When the plant becomes fully operational next month, the district will no longer have to rely solely on chlorine to purify the drinking water consumed by residents of the Ojai Valley, western Ventura and coastal areas to the Santa Barbara County line.

Because the plant should reduce the need for disinfectants, it may improve the water’s taste.

But it will certainly improve its safety, said John Curphey, a sanitary engineer with the state’s health services department.

Filtering water through a treatment plant is safer than disinfecting it, he said.

“We didn’t really identify people getting sick, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Curphey said.

The need for the plant had been discussed for years. In 1978, local ranchers and farmers--who use about half the district’s water and don’t need it filtered expensively--railed against the plant’s then $7-million cost, said district civil engineer Steve Wickstrum. The district’s board promptly killed the project.

But tighter state and federal drinking water standards eventually forced the district to construct the plant.

A decade of 3% annual water rate increases will help pay for the plant--as will a commitment from Ventura to buy a minimum of $930,000 worth of water from the district annually--but customers could have seen much higher water bills, Johnson said.

The district shaved two-thirds off the $30-million price tag of the original 1990 proposal by using a cheaper, new technology.

Using gravity, lake water is forced through eight 49-foot-long tanks containing filters made of crushed coal and two different types of sand, Wickstrum said. The plant can produce some 65 million gallons of drinking water daily.

The added capability of purifying the water has also precipitated a debate over whether to allow body contact with the lake water, something that is prohibited without a treatment plant.

An advisory committee is expected to release its recommendations next month for the type of body-contact recreation the district should permit on the lake.

But most committee members favor allowing sailing, canoeing and kayaking and oppose self-propelled water skis on the lake, Johnson said. The debate over swimming remains unresolved.