Water Customers Face Costly Low-Salt Diet

With a court deadline looming, water quality regulators are speeding up efforts to cut salt levels in the troubled Calleguas Creek watershed, a move that could tack up to $480 each year onto the average water bill of east county homeowners.

Salt reduction is intended to improve crop yields for avocado growers in the Las Posas and Santa Rosa valleys, but city and water district officials who are fighting the proposal say that taxpayers should not have to foot the tab.

This week, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is expected to release a draft report detailing a new, more stringent standard for the amount of chloride allowed in the Calleguas watershed--which includes Moorpark, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley.

The board will vote on the proposal in March--the deadline for a new chloride standard mandated by a 1999 court settlement with Los Angeles environmental groups, said John Bishop, chief of regional programs for the water board.

If approved, municipalities say they would each have to spend $60 million to $70 million constructing treatment facilities in the next five years, which would translate into monthly rate hikes of $20 to $40.

The county’s avocado growers have complained for years that the high concentration of salt in irrigation water is hurting crop production.

“We’re a thorn in their side, because we’re the little stakeholder at the bottom of the creek, but it’s killing our avocados, and it’s a [multimillion-dollar] industry,” said Ann DeMartini, general manger of two Somis water companies that provide ground water to Las Posas growers.

But cities and water districts that discharge millions of gallons of treated waste water into the creek daily say a tougher standard--and the energy-intensive technology needed to achieve it--are unreasonable. In any case, they say, there are other, less drastic solutions.

The Calleguas watershed is a system of arroyos and creeks that shuttle treated waste water and urban runoff from eastern Ventura County through Camarillo and into Mugu Lagoon. Most of the area’s drinking water is imported from Northern California, while farmers use ground water for irrigation. The underground aquifers are replenished by rain and by creek water that trickles into the soil.

Chlorides are a medley of salty pollutants that give drinking water a chalky taste and attack the roots of certain sensitive crops, particularly avocados and strawberries.

While a problem elsewhere, such as in the nearby Santa Clara River watershed, chlorides are particularly high in Calleguas. Not only is the area naturally salty, but the volume of treated sewer water--which includes salty waste from residential water softeners, soaps and detergents--is minimally diluted by natural mountain runoff.

The only feasible way to remove chloride is through reverse osmosis, which forces the salty particles out of the water through a sophisticated system of membranes. Not only is the method costly, it’s energy-intensive. And in the midst of the state’s power crisis, that could drive the price even higher, officials said.

“This could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses for ratepayers and arguably very minimal benefit,” said Paul Simmons, a Sacramento attorney recently hired by Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Camarillo, the Camrosa Water District and a county water district in Moorpark to represent them in the fight.

Regulators, however, maintain they have to protect the sensitive users along the creek, and that dischargers will have time to comply with the new standard.

Currently, regulators allow Calleguas water to contain up to 150 parts per million of chloride. The substance harms humans at 250 ppm and damages marine life at 230 ppm. The regional board is proposing to cut the level to 110 ppm, the optimal level for avocado growing.

“We have legal requirements, and part of our mandate is to protect water quality,” Bishop said. “The Clean Water Act was put in place to maintain and improve water quality, even though it recognized this would be expensive.”

Desalination Would Be Costly

While construction of reverse osmosis plants is a huge capital expense, officials say it would be even more costly to operate the treatment facilities. Roughly $1.5 million to $2 million would be needed to run and maintain the new equipment each year, officials said.

Another cost would be $56 million to build a pipe to get rid of the salt waste. The so-called “brine line” is being studied by the Calleguas Municipal Water District. State and federal grants are probably available for that project, but they would require local matching funds.

Sam McIntyre, owner of Somis Pacific Ag near Moorpark, which manages 1,000 acres of avocado trees in the valley, said growers are sensitive to the costs that would be borne by ratepayers. The agriculture community, he said, will work with cities and water districts to minimize costs.

“There are a lot of ways we can bring the cost to the homeowner down,” McIntyre said. Water can be blended to reduce the amount that needs to be treated, and new technologies being studied could help, he said.

Waste-water treatment plant operators insist, though, that it’s more than just money.

They disagree with the regional board’s approach, arguing that drastically reduced levels of salt in the creek would not solve the farmers’ chloride woes. In fact, because salt is left when irrigation water evaporates, farming itself will continue to add the element to ground water, said Camarillo Public Works Director Robert Westdyke.

Richard Hajas, general manager of Camrosa Water District--which sells water to residents and farmers--agreed.

“They’re trying to set a regulation they claim is going to benefit agriculture, and the fact is we don’t believe it will,” he said.

City and water officials have proposed solutions that are less burdensome for taxpayers.

They say Calleguas could sell imported drinking water--which has very low chloride levels--to avocado growers, with the high costs subsidized by the rest of the watershed. Another idea is to have farmers treat the ground water with reverse osmosis directly at the wells.

While farmers are open to such ideas, the environmental community is not.

“That’s more of a Band-Aid,” said John Buse, senior attorney in the Environmental Defense Center’s Ventura office. If ground water is abandoned in favor of imported water, the underground supply will get saltier and saltier and eventually become unusable, he said.

“Once the ground water resource is lost, it will be very difficult to get it back,” he said.

Lowell Preston, the county’s water resources manager, said he also disagrees with those types of short-term fixes.

“That’s giving away the ground water basin, and we just can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t contaminate the world just because it’s going to cost.”

Bishop, of the regional water board, said those measures can be used as part of the implementation plan for the new standard, but treatment plants also will have to build reverse osmosis facilities.

Another factor is the chance that dischargers, faced with a daunting new standard, would opt to send treated waste water straight to the ocean through a pipe, possibly the brine line, instead of into Calleguas Creek.

But state Department of Fish and Game regulations prohibit the creek from going totally dry, said Natasha Lohmus, an environmental specialist with the department.

Aquatic life such as western pond turtles, a variety of bird species and mosquito fish populate the creek bed. They have adapted to the water levels and probably the salinity content, she said, although less salt would not hurt.

“Once habitat is established, you cannot just eliminate it,” Lohmus said. There is no specific number for what the discharge must be, but it must be “enough to go downstream to support the resources, whether that’s 10% or 90%” of the flow.

Also, cutting the creek levels would be detrimental to the watershed, experts say, and could jeopardize the future of water in eastern Ventura County.

Joint Solution Advocated

The struggle over salt in Calleguas began in the early 1980s, when the area began to grow.

Simi Valley sits on swampy farmland, where the water table is very close to the surface and exceedingly salty. To prevent the town from flooding, the city pumps the water into the creek, said John Behjan, principal engineer for the city. More growth increased the volume of flows to sewage plants, which treat the water but don’t remove salts before discharging into the creek.

Those two factors have caused salt levels in ground water to be as much as 40% higher as when growers first began using it, DeMartini said.

The effects are physical, as tips of leaves appear burned, and avocado trees bear less fruit, said Craig Underwood, owner of Underwood Ranches in Las Posas Valley. A production loss in numbers is hard to pinpoint.

“You know you don’t have as vigorous a grove as someone with good water,” he said.

But growers should shoulder some of the responsibility, city officials counter.

“Farmers want someone else to pay millions of dollars so they can have access to very precious clean water and actually get richer,” Behjan said.

DeMartini said she’s tired of all the arrows being pointed at agriculture.

“If they want us to be the fall guy, that’s fine--we’re going to take the heat,” she said. “But it’s everybody’s basin.”

Meanwhile, officials at the Calleguas Municipal Water District are preparing a long-term management plan for the watershed, and an update on it will be presented at a State of the Watershed conference planned for Friday.

“We’re advocating we collectively solve the chloride issue as a county problem,” said Don Kendall, Calleguas’ general manager. “My goal is to get everyone working together.”

Despite the strong opinions on all sides, the regional board has no choice but to adopt a new standard in March, officials said. If the deadline passes, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to set the standard, Bishop said, and it is expected to back the 110 ppm standard or one even more stringent.

Local water officials hope the regional board will consider setting a number that’s easier to achieve. But that doesn’t appear likely, despite the argument that avocado and strawberry growing is the only use that requires such low salt levels.

“The reason this is so important to the environmental community is because of the precedent it sets,” said Mark Gold, executive director of the Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay. If a lax standard is approved for Calleguas, “who’s to say that won’t eventually allow for beaches that are not safe for swimming or creeks that are toxic to aquatic life?”

But city officials say the precedent they fear concerns the cost-benefit ratio.

“If we saw any sense that this will do something valuable, we could take it to the ratepayers,” said Westdyke, Camarillo’s public works director. “But I really do not understand this one, and I just can’t accept it.”