Marin Voice: MMWD needs to move beyond continuing era of water denial
The path to a permanent water supply solution for the 191,000 water users in central and southern Marin has been a long and arduous one. Yet we remain at the starting line.
When North Marin is included, our total water-starved population is a little over 252,409.
This year, the stretch from January to July was the driest in Marin County in the last 128 years according to the National Integrated Drought Information System website run by the U.S. government. This works out to 17.39 inches below the normal rainfall for the same period.
No doubt, these statistics are well known to the five overseers of our water future on the Marin Municipal Water District Board of Directors, but some of the cranial spigots appear to be turned off.
The MMWD board has not been short on promises guaranteeing a reliable water supply. What is less evident (for decades) is that it has been fully alert to the debacles largely of its own creation. It is time to wake up.
A sufficient water supply is not a negotiable commodity. Next to oxygen, it is the principal sustainer of all life forms. Without it, the planet will wither away and die. Without enough of it, much of the precious landscape we call Marin could take on the appearance of a desert.
It is not for the lack of the abundant element – which covers 75% of the Earth – that we are enduring the worst drought in 140 years following the shorter and cautionary drought of 1976-77.
It has more to do with MMWD’s eye-popping unwillingness to recognize a historic change in climate patterns that demands we completely revamp the ways we conduct water policy. Creating access to more water is not merely optional. Like the pressing need to remove millions of tons of carbon and methane from the atmosphere, it is a life-threatening necessity.
What is curious is how the voices that argue most vociferously for preserving our environment (of which I count myself as one) cannot recognize the degradation we are wreaking on the environment by calling for solutions that guarantee only more years of insufficient water.
The fact is there is no water shortage. We have water denial. Infinite amounts of it have always been readily available. We are surrounded by it and we have the engineering talent to tap into it if there was the political will to do so.
As long ago as 2002, three MMWD board members, including Rep. Jared Huffman — an able legislator and redoubtable environmentalist – voted to pay a paltry $69,000 to URS Corporation for initial planning and environmental services preparatory to building a desalination plant.
In a speech to the Marin Environmental Forum that November, Huffman said a plant could be “running in two to five years” and noted it would bring “a boundless resource.” Environmental opposition killed further progress.
Marin operated a highly successful “Desal Demonstration Plant” for 11 months from 2005 to 2006. It garnered a national engineering award. Now, 20 years after that initial vote, the Marin board has hired a much more costly consultant to take yet another look.
The final Jacobs Engineering report has now been unaccountably delayed. Meanwhile, interim reports have spewed out preposterously bogus cost numbers about desalination that even this board has challenged.
What if the newly elected board decides that the final results are inconclusive and requires still another consulting firm?
“So much of the water conversation has been about conservation, a scarcity mindset,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said recently. “Now we are focusing on creating more water. … Environmental regulations have prevented as many good projects from getting built as bad ones.”
His exasperation is understandable. If only some of that mindset could take hold at MMWD.
The parched ground in combination with scorching heat waves triggering cataclysmic wildfires destroying millions of acres of greenbelt and forests, as well as millions of dollars in property damage, is undeniable evidence: Drought is now a pandemic.
The MMWD has been given the wakeup call. It is time to deliver.
Richard Rubin lives in Strawberry.