Another advantage to self-sufficiency is it will break the monopoly which the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has on water sales. Court documents show that the MWD has been overcharging the San Diego Water District $25 million a year and undercharging Los Angeles. The MWD responded to a law suit by saying “there is no regulatory cap on water charges” and they can set the rate at whatever level they want and “can’t be challenged.”
I propose:
• Desalination plants. I will recommend that we build 5 seawater desalination plants between 2012 and 2030, financed with grants and loans from other water districts which stand to gain increased use of Colorado River Water and northern California delta water. Studies have shown that desalination is the most cost effective option for boosting water supplies.
These plants, however, should not be owned by private investors, water is a public resource. Corporate ownership would mean our drinking water is a commodity which could hoarded and manipulated for a higher price; like electricity was illegally by San Diego Gas & Electric’s Sempra Corporation during the deregulation crisis in California in 2001. Also, these plants would use solar power, known as the Reverse Osmosis Solar Installation (ROSI) system, with membrane filtration systems to overcome the high energy costs and high levels of greenhouse emissions of other world conventional reverse osmosis plants. The seawater concentrated by-product would be diluted before being pumped back to protect our bays and lagoons.
• A San Diego Water Commission
I propose that the City of San Diego create a citizen-run, elected, Water Commission (similar to the Housing Commission) to take control over the City’s Water and Sanitation Department to not only oversee the day-to-day operations, including cost factors, but to plan for long term water independence for the city. Water Commissioners would also negotiate water rates with the various water agencies. They also would be charged with reducing sewer costs through reclaimed water sales to farms and factories.
• Rainwater Harvesting and Reuse Systems
All new buildings and any improvements on existing buildings, including single-family residences, would be required to install rainwater harvesting, storage and re-use systems with the amount dependent on the square feet of the structure.
Rainwater harvesting systems are very advanced and extremely affordable. The cost of additional plumbing for the secondary water system would be a loan from the city, paid back by the savings on water bills.
The stored water would be used for non-drinking purposes such as toilets, washing clothes, watering plants, and cleaning purposes. This alone would halve the amount of water each person uses each day.
Skyscrapers and other large buildings could combine to channel rainwater to common storage tanks. Neighborhoods, likewise, could create a water storage district to store the unused runoff in local storage facilities.
• Begin the pilot program of water recycling. The money has already been approved with the Council’s special water rate increase, the design is in place – pipes running 17 miles from the North City Water reclamation Plant to the San Vicente Reservoir – and there is plenty of documentation from other cities, in California and worldwide, that purified water from wastewater is safe and economically beneficial to the community.
San Diegans already drink water which once went through homes and left as wastewater. All along the Colorado River there are dwellings, particularly on the Indian Reservations, which have septic tanks, and the wastewater ends up in the river. Once in a while, during very hot summer days, when the temperature reaches over 125 degrees, Lake Havasu has to be closed to the public as the raw sewage begins to ferment and create a biological hazard. Yet, when it comes out of our taps it is clean, purified, healthy water.
Water Independence by 2030!
One of the greatest gifts we can give our children and grand-children would be to create water independence from distant sources. This will not only insure our future as a viable and healthy community but it will shrink the cost of water which is probably going to see a 5% increase in price each year well into the future.
We can return to the past, when San Diego was self-sufficient in water. In 1769, settlers built a dam across the San Diego River and built a six-mile canal to the Mission. By 1897, six reservoirs stored enough water for the city 35,000 residents. It wasn’t until the early 1930’s that San Diego imported water.
Seventy percent of San Diego’s drinking water comes from the Colorado River, yet each year there is less and less volume as global warming heats up the Rocky Mountains. The Metropolitan Water District, based in Los Angeles, San Diego’s wholesale supplier, has had to turn to expensive water diversions from Northern California, particularly around Lake Oroville which is at 40 percent of capacity, and harebrained, corporate kickback projects like Cadiz, Inc.’s scheme to dump water into a whole in the Mojave Desert.
Now over the years, hypocritical San Diego politicians have called for simple conservation as an answer to our water needs, and San Diegans responded by lowering their water use per household. But the members of the oligarchy, San Diego’s wealthy elite, continued to fill their pools and water their acre gardens. Golf course grasses glistened as school-yard playgrounds and neighborhood parks became dusty brown lots.
Former City Council President Scott Peters, his wife and two children were consuming 923,000 gallons of water a year, while the average San Diego family used only 125,600 gallons annually. He said he needed to water the landscaping around his tennis courts. Meanwhile, Mayor Jerry Sanders, who took to the airwaves peddling conservation, was using 40 percent more water at his Kensington home than the average San Diegan. We cannot continue with the hypocrisy of professional politicians and the reckless dominance of the corporate state which regards water as a commodity not the life-blood of humanity.
Two thousands years ago the world’s population of 250 million people had the same amount of freshwater available as our present 6 billion global inhabitants. With less than 1 percent of the world’s water available as freshwater this vital component of human existence will become ever more precious as rapid population growth (85 million new people each year) depletes groundwater aquifers.
Water wars will consume whole continents. There are presently more “water refugees” than war refugees, according to a United Nations study. Millions of families are forced to migrate, whole cities are rationing water (half of all cities in China are water short) and in India, ground water is being pumped out at twice the rate it is being replaced.
The United States, blessed with 8 percent of the planet’s freshwater and only 4 percent of its population, must overcome its distribution problems and become a reservoir for a parched Earth. We must use this liquid gold, not to make investors richer, but as a type of foreign aid to bring peace and prosperity to troubled areas.
Market forces will not save us from a water shortage nightmare. Capitalism, particularly corporate dominated monopoly capitalism with its predatory nature which encourages shortages and hoarding, will simply raise the price as demand outstrips supply. Fortune magazine called water the “oil of the 21st Century” noting that annual water profits of over $1 trillion are 50 percent of those of the oil industry.
Already there is an attempt by multi-national corporations to “corner the market” on water sources in third world countries. A growing movement to keep water as a public trust has aided people’s governments, particularly in Latin America, to fight off privatization. “Operating as a sanctioned monopoly, a private water company is able to exploit the lack of competition,” Public Citizen warned, “communities’ interests are often trampled and disregarded once public control is surrendered and without transparency or accountability, water corporations are breeding grounds for bribery, kickbacks and other forms of corruption, many cases of which have been documented in the U.S.”
Corporations are now buying up whole water systems in far off lands to carry fresh water great distances in supertankers and giant sealed water bags, moved around like oil, and converted to “bottled water” we buy at the supermarket. This mass movement of bulk water and its disastrous environmental impacts will only increase as we in the 1st world communities raise our children on plastic incased water, imported from far away places. Just as we would call a plumber and get a leaky pipe fixed at our homes; so too, must we find the will and the money to fix our community’s water needs problem.