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After a period of more than six years, the Cambria Community Service District (CCSD) submitted its supposedly completed Coastal Development Permit (CDP) application to the SLO County Planning and Construction Department in July 2020. The initial application for ordinary CDP was submitted in June 2014. Prior to that, the county issued an emergency permit in May 2014 to build the emergency water supply project, built in October 2014. The facility has faced many problems, including the decommissioning of the brine evaporation pond, ordered by the Regional Water Quality Control Council, as well as numerous fines from the same agency. After consideration by county planning, it was determined that only a small percentage of the application was complete, after more than six years! The district plans to have the regular CDP by October / November, but it will be months, if not a year or more, before the requirements are met. The project will undoubtedly be the subject of an appeal to the California Coastal Commission when and if approved by County Planning and the Board of Supervisors.
The Emergency Water Project is a brackish water desalination facility that has been presented to the community as a proposal 218 tariff increase, to pay for a $ 9 million project (with interest , $ 13.4 million). The intention of the project, as we Cambrians have been led to believe, was to secure a water supply during a Level 3 drought emergency for the current residents. The district was able to secure $ 4.3 million in state funding for Proposition 84, which we were told would be used to repay the loan. Not a penny was spent on repayment of the loan. On the same day the check arrived for state funding, the district’s public information officer, Tom Gray (a CCSD candidate), released a memo in which the project was given a different name: Sustainable Water Facility. The objective has changed from an emergency project to a project allowing the growth of 650 plots, despite the fact that Cambria has been declared a water moratorium since 2001.
Cambrians footed the bill to allow about 650 projects on a water waiting list for people to build their “dream” homes, or for speculation, with big rate hikes to pay for the problems always increasing associated with installation. The district is currently in dispute (since 2018) with the firm that designed and built the project. The facility has been closed since December 2016 and has not been used to produce water, we did not need it!
The main topic for Cambria’s CSD candidates (numbering four) in this election will be growth versus no growth, an emergency water supply project (as initially planned and accepted by a majority de Cambriens) or the ease of sustainable water supply. , For growth. Cambrians were never able to vote for the Sustainable Water Facility, which was decided for the community behind closed doors in 2015, and the CCDS responded to this in the 2017 Supplemental Environmental Impact Report.
The choice, then, is to keep paying more and more for those who want to build here – in an already overgrown city, extremely vulnerable to fires, and in a year when fires are raging across the state –Where to supplement the demand for the emergency water supply project – for an emergency water supply in times of drought – the reason it would have been built in the first place. I will vote for the two candidates who are not supporting growth, who want to protect our city and want our taxpayers’ money to be spent on much needed infrastructure: Karen Dean and Harry Farmer. I urge the Cambrians who are fed up with this unsustainable project, which has cost us far more millions than we have been led to believe, to do the same. ??
Tina Dickason writes from Cambria. Send a response for publication to [email protected].
