The Signal

9/23/2004

Court Voids SCV’s Water Plan
by Leon Worden, City Editor

Local environmental activists won a major victory Wednesday when an appellate court invalidated the valley’s Urban Water Management Plan.
    The court found that the local water agencies failed to provide adequate information about perchlorate contamination in the groundwater supply when they adopted the plan in 2000.
    The plan, required by state law every five years, was compiled by the Castaic Lake Water Agency and ratified by the area’s four water retailers. The plan forecasts water availability over a five-year period and the information is used by the city and county in their development approval decisions.
    The Sierra Club, Friends of the Santa Clara River and the county of Ventura sued the water agencies over the plan, alleging that it was too optimistic in its projections of water availability. Ventura County withdrew from the lawsuit after a Superior Court judge upheld the water plan in February 2003, but the other plaintiffs appealed.
    It was the first time in California that an Urban Water Management Plan had been challenged in court.
    Friends President Ron Bottorff and member Lynne Plambeck could not be reached at press time. Plambeck has assailed the agencies and the water plan on numerous occasions for counting perchlorate-contaminated water as “available.”
    CLWA General Manager Dan Masnada said the ruling doesn’t mean less water is available.
    “There really is no water supply impact,” he said.
    “(The ruling) is a setback in the sense that the appeals court did not see it as the Superior Court did,” Masnada said. “We will have to go back and update the information as it relates to perchlorate, which we really didn’t know in 2000.”
    Perchlorate, a rocket fuel component, was first detected in 1997 in deep-water wells near the contaminated Whittaker-Bermite property in central Santa Clarita. Four affected wells were closed, as was a fifth well that taps into the shallower alluvium when perchlorate was detected there in late 2002.
    “Only so much was known” when the plan was adopted in December 2000, he said. “We disclosed what we did know.”
    Most groundwater is drawn from the alluvium and mixed with state water before it is delivered to customers.
    “Every last drop is treated,” Masnada said.
    He said the court’s most substantial finding was that the water plan didn’t adequately address “timing issues associated with the implementation of the treatment technology and the remediation.”
    CLWA has sued Whittaker Corp. to pay for the cleanup of the perchlorate, and the agency is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to investigate the extent of the contamination. CLWA and Whittaker are expected to come to terms on a treatment method in the next month, Masnada said.
    For now, he said, “the Urban Water Management Plan stands, but once it’s remanded back to the Superior Court, (we’re) not sure if we’ll have to modify it or submit a new one addressing (just) the perchlorate issue.”
    Because they are required every five years, preparations to submit a new plan in 2005 are already under way, Masnada said.
    “The project team has already started work on that,” he said. “We’ve got five more years of information under our belt.”