Oxnard Offers Overhaul of Water System

Bracing for future water shortages and rising prices, Oxnard on Thursday unveiled a $50-million overhaul of the city’s ground water supply system, intended to provide the city with cheaper and more reliable supplies.

The ambitious program includes construction of a regional desalination plant to treat brackish ground water and make it potable, and a plan to recycle waste water for agricultural use. The plan at various points in the process is subject to City Council approval.

“Things are getting tighter. Meanwhile, demand is going up,” said Ken Ortega, Oxnard water superintendent. “This was designed to bridge the gap, to make up the deficit that will just get larger as demand for water escalates.”

The city is limited in the amount of ground water it can use by regulations set by the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency. Officials hope a plan to recycle unusable waste water would help that problem.

The city plans to supply the recycled waste water--treated by a process called reverse osmosis, which runs the water through membranes to screen out contaminants--to agriculture.

This, in turn, would allow the city to allocate more ground water for drinking, because ranchers would not be using up the limit set by Fox Canyon.

The recycled water would also be used to create a barrier between the sea and the city’s ground water, keeping the drinking water from being further tainted by seawater.

Concurrently, the city would build a regional desalination plant to treat more of the brackish ground water and make it potable. That water would be blended with high-quality, more expensive water the city already buys from the Calleguas Water District, which gets its water from Northern California.

Also, the city wants to build a so-called “brine line,” which would take salty discharge from the two treatment facilities and send it to Ormond Beach for wetland habitat.

“What the project does is it recognizes different quality water for different things,” Ortega said.

“[Recycled water] goes to agricultural users, who in exchange don’t pump their wells. So that pumping goes right to the city of Oxnard,” he said.

The city of Port Hueneme already has a ground water-treatment plant, but it would be turned over to Oxnard to be used to recycle effluent, said Robert Eranio, Port Hueneme water superintendent.

The new regional desalination plant would then serve the naval bases, city of Port Hueneme and the Channel Islands water district, as well as Oxnard, Eranio said.

Officials have not picked a site for the new facility but are looking at four locations, including one in El Rio and one at the current water facility. It would be three to five years before the plant is completed, and design plans are not expected to be finished for at least another year, Ortega said.

Santa Barbara has mothballed its desalination plant, which was designed to treat ocean water for drinking. But this project would be much more cost-effective and would ultimately even out, because the city would have to rely less on expensive, high-quality water from the north, officials said.

The city hopes to get about half its funding from state and federal grants and other water purveyors, Ortega said. The rest may come from water users.