In Monterey County, Morale Lower Than Water Supply

John Church stands on his two acres high above Carmel Valley and scans the honeysuckle and chaparral, past thick oaks and handsome vineyards, to green golf courses and hills browned to a late-summer velvet. Once, the ruddy gas station owner relished sunsets from this land. “Like neon,” he says. “Fabulous.”

When he dreamed about the home he would someday build, his heart would soar. But now a visit to the hilltop leaves his stomach tied in knots.

“When I come up here I think about what could be, and I get so angry I can’t stand it,” says Church, 56. “Sometimes I think it is best if I don’t come at all.”

Like many other people on the Monterey Peninsula, Church is heartsick over water. He can’t get any. And without it, he can’t build the house where he hoped to care for his aging father and, someday, to retire.

From Pebble Beach to Carmel--and the much-romanticized spots in between--hundreds of people find themselves in similar predicaments. Some can’t build retirement homes. Others are prevented from remodeling. The addition of a single toilet can take an act of two government agencies and the local water company--if it is approved at all.

The rest of the state has seen new housing starts jump sharply in each of the last four years. At the same time, the peninsula of legendary golf courses, a world-class aquarium and a land baron named Clint Eastwood grants building permits only to those rich enough, inventive enough or patient enough to find water.

The Monterey Peninsula is positively parched not because of Mother Nature, but as the result of a man-made drought. The problem began in earnest when the state’s water overseers ruled four years ago that the local water company was pumping 69% too much water from the Carmel River.

Drastic reductions were ordered. Monterey County and the city of Pacific Grove have waiting lists for property owners who want new water hookups. Many desperate residents are drilling their own wells or concocting elaborate deals to trade for water rights owned by farmers or developers.

Like New Yorkers watching the obituaries for apartment openings, Peninsulites scan the paper for building projects that have gone belly-up--hoping water will be freed for their own construction.

One local group is threatening to stop paying taxes. The water company gets calls from “vigilantes” trying to report illegal water hookups. One property owner who refused to go on the water waiting list in Pacific Grove paid more than $50,000 for access to water that once served a now-closed laundry.

A businessman is reportedly asking at least that much for the rights to the water he used to get from the local water company before he drilled his own well.

It has even come to this: Well-meaning citizens are rooting against construction of a small senior citizens housing project, so they can have the water.

“Ugly things happen when people are competing for the same commodity,” said Morgan Gilman, who has been waiting more than four years to build a home on beachfront property near Carmel.

Missed Opportunities

The verdant Monterey Peninsula seems an unlikely spot for water wars. While its annual precipitation of 17 inches is relatively spare, last year’s El Nino storms brought 43 inches of rain. The problem is that facilities for storing the water are sorely lacking. Almost all of last year’s deluge--enough water to serve 800,000 homes--washed out to sea.

The water shortage might have been solved long ago if not for the fact that many locals already have their own water and don’t particularly want more, because it fuels growth. California 1 is already overcrowded, and many residents see the peaceful retreat of old slipping away.

The water equation began to change drastically, however, in 1995, when the state Water Quality Control Board ruled that even current customers were using water illegally pumped from the Carmel River.

Environmentalists had complained, saying that steelhead trout and red-legged frogs were suffering because the California-American Water Co. was over-pumping the river. The company is under order to return that water to the river, which is not much more than a meandering stream for most of the year.

Voluntary conservation has already cut consumption by 20%, to what is believed to be the lowest per-customer usage in the state. But the water company must eventually return much more water--10,730 acre-feet, or enough to serve roughly 43,000 homes--to the river.

Water company executives say they need to build a new dam on the Carmel River, one large enough to supply residents on the peninsula and guarantee a year-round flow downstream.

They pledge that a concrete dam 24 miles upstream from the ocean will only provide for current residents and, perhaps, properties that have been legally approved for construction, but no new subdivisions or commercial developments.

But some anti-growth forces say they are not persuaded that the dam’s water wouldn’t be used to fuel more growth. They complain that a dam might prevent the winter flushing needed to renew the steelhead’s pebbly spawning grounds.

“I don’t believe the promises for a minute,” said George Boehlert, president of the Carmel Valley Property Owners Assn. “A new water board or some other group could change that. People here have such a hard time stopping new development. There are ways they could get around those promises.”

The local chapter of the Sierra Club is suggesting dam alternatives that include a plant to desalinate ocean water and a mechanism to inject storm runoff into an aquifer for storage.

The peninsula is awash in other proposals. A Manhattan Beach entrepreneur has been peddling his solution--dragging giant water-filled bags through the ocean from Eureka to Monterey. Each could carry 4.5 million gallons.

A local water gadfly suggests that the city of Monterey should lay claim to historic water rights from the days of the Mexican land grants.

Officials at the state Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the Cal-Am water company, expect activists to force the issue onto the ballot.

In the past, local voters have succeeded only in expressing what they don’t want. Both a desalination plant and a dam project went down to defeat in elections over the last six years.

That can’t happen again, says Judy Almond, manager for Cal-Am water. The company and its customers will have to shoulder massive fines from the state if a new water source is not secured.

“My sense is that people don’t believe there is really a problem,” Almond said. “They don’t think there will be a $3-million fine. It’s almost like we need a real drought to get people to sense that this is real.”

The cynicism of those waiting for water has been heightened because of the success of a few business people in obtaining water rights and building large-scale developments.

The Pebble Beach Co. has a golf course and 315 homes on the drawing board. It freed up water rights by helping to build a treatment plant that irrigates three of the company’s famed golf courses with reclaimed water.

Eastwood, the actor and onetime Carmel mayor, has won approval for 88 luxury homes and yet another golf course (the peninsula’s 19th) on a mountain overlooking Carmel. Eastwood plans to use water credits obtained from agricultural land he purchased and removed from cultivation. (Further embittering those without water is the fact that some state water officials have been quoted as saying that Eastwood’s project was fast-tracked.)

Yet another entrepreneur is so “desperate” to build, in the words of one regulator, that he plans to erect an on-site desalination plant as part of a retail and condominium project on Monterey’s Cannery Row.

Those who cannot afford such extreme measures sit and wait. Nearly 100 individuals and companies are queued on the waiting list for the county and Pacific Grove; other municipalities don’t keep track of how many people have applied. “We have no water and we’re not getting any, any time soon,” said one Carmel city official.

Some have been waiting for four years or more, including Nilda Argandona and Manuel Langtry. The couple bought their dream property in Pebble Beach, just a couple of blocks off the scenic 17 Mile Drive, with ocean views obscured only by Monterey pines. But the pair, who sold their house in New York and moved West to retire, have been unable to obtain water. Most of their money is tied up in a property that they can’t build on or sell.

“We are four years in this. . . . We are stuck,” said Argandona, 59. Now when she comes to the beautiful property, she said: “I hate it. I just hate it.”

About the “last game in town,” according to one county planning official, is the chance that a project with established water rights will fail.

Deciding on Priorities

Such is the fervent wish of Argandona, her husband and about 20 others on the waiting list who will get water if a 24-unit townhouse project for senior citizens is killed. The Monterey County Planning Commission recently voted down the so-called Carmel Greens development. But the project still lives, pending a hearing before the Board of Supervisors.

Seldom has housing that might help the elderly drawn such wrath. Opponents cite potential traffic problems and the slow progress of the proposal, which has been on the books for nearly 30 years.

“They had their chance. My take is that they have not been diligent,” said Gilman, the 63-year-old waiting to build near Carmel. He adds candidly: “Some of us who have been waiting very patiently would like to get that water.”

Even if the senior housing project fails, it would not free enough water to help Church.

Some months back, he got so frustrated that he made an offhand remark that the water district official overseeing new hookups “ought to be shot.” Church says he was only talking, but county sheriff’s deputies take harsh words seriously. They came to question him before dropping the matter.

Now, Church mostly tries to stay away from the issue, to keep his emotions in check. But the gas station owner said he is increasingly worried about his 84-year-old father, who is in poor health. He would desperately like to move his father into a new house on that lot overlooking the valley.

“The ultimate whack in the face will be if he dies and this land is still sitting here,” Church said. “I would like to be able to do something while I still can.”