Wave of the Future or Washout?

SANTA BARBARA — On a Thursday morning in mid-February, one day after a rainstorm had swept in from the Pacific, a soggy bedroll lay abandoned on the concrete apron of the city’s Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility. This was flotsam, of sorts, from the storm, left behind by one of the transients who, in a downpour, sometimes will take shelter beneath the rows of gray-green truck trailers that contain the plant’s operative guts.

“They like to sleep under them,” a facility custodian explained. “It’s nice and dry.”

At the moment, this ad hoc duty as rain cover for drifters might well represent the highest and best use of a $34-million plant once heralded as a bold plunge forward into California’s future, in its time the most ambitious attempt ever by a U.S. city to tap the ocean for domestic water.

The plant was constructed nine years ago in a rush, at the worst of a five-year drought that in the end had Santa Barbarans painting their lawns green and counting the days before their water supplies would dry up altogether.

It was completed just after the healing rains returned and, except for a three-month shakedown period, it has sat idle ever since. The prospects for its producing water any time soon roughly equal the chances of peace breaking out in California’s interminable water wars, which is another way of saying: somewhat beyond slim.

City water officials have calculated that, even in the worst-case scenarios of statewide drought, the desalination plant will probably not be needed until “well into” the new century. There are many reasons for this, none of which has anything to do with the plant’s ability to crank out potable water.

Depending on who is interpreting its history, the facility--or what’s left of it after a recent fire sale of many movable parts to a Saudi Arabian company--represents a golden example of visionary civic planning or, and this tends to be the more popular analysis, a high-tech monument to panic.

In a muted way, it also lends some perspective to the often panting rhetoric of California water politics. To some participants in the wrangle over water, the fact that a technically viable desalination plant could be built, paid for and then mothballed challenges the often heard warning that there is not enough water to go around. What might be in short supply, they suggest, is not water, but cheap water.

Former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, a proponent of desalination, wrote in his 1998 book, “Tapped Out” (Welcome Rain Publishers), that the Santa Barbara facility, no matter how little water it produced, was important nonetheless for this reason: “Each time a new plant is built, we increase our knowledge of how to do the job better.”

Santa Barbara’s experience to date, however, has mainly yielded pointers on how best to shutter an unneeded facility.

For the first few years, the plant was kept in a so-called active standby mode. Subsequent cost-benefit analyses indicated that it would be prudent to decommission the facility--”long-term storage” is the euphemism city officials prefer.

The next logical step was to attempt to recoup some of the initial investment by selling off parts. On Dec. 30 the Public Works Department issued a brief and largely ignored news release, which began with this understated sentence--”The city has sold some desalination facility equipment, which is surplus to its needs.”

What it had sold was 14 truck trailers full of essential filtering components and related equipment. The plant’s initial production capacity was 7,500 acre-feet of water per year. After the sale, the facility could produce less than half that amount.

Valued at $5.1 million, the equipment was purchased by Saudi Industrial Services Co. for $1.8 million--”a pretty good deal,” said Bob Roebuck, the city’s water resources manager, “considering the stuff was 9 years old, slightly used, no guarantee, no warranty, as is, where is.”

As he spoke, the parts were aboard ships, sailing for the port city of Jiddah, where by summer they should be transforming salty intake from the Red Sea into drinking water.

Montecito and Goleta Withdrew

For Santa Barbara, the logic of the sale was twofold. Montecito and Goleta, neighboring communities that initially joined in the desalting adventure, had pulled out; Santa Barbara officials had determined that an annual desalting capacity of 3,000 acre-feet would be plenty. Also, should conditions ever make it advantageous for the city to expand the facility, new filtering equipment could be purchased and plugged into the remaining superstructure. In either case, retrofitting the plant for restart would cost millions.

To hear city officials tell it, the desalting plant was intended all along only as a spare tire, a hedge against drought. And now they have simply replaced the full-sized spare with one of those new miniature jobs, designed to let a motorist wobble on to the next filling station.

In the beginning, though, the plant was pitched to and perceived by many Santa Barbarans, not so much as a spare tire, but as a whole new mode of transportation.

For centuries, the sea has been contemplated as an ultimate solution to water shortage, and it seemed that Santa Barbara, at least in California, had made it to the future first.

A June 1, 1991, editorial in the Santa Barbara New-Press rhapsodized: “Santa Barbara is poised to be at the front of the line. It could be the first link in the chain, but the model fits up and down California’s coast: a network of desalination plants, running on the clean energy of fuel cells or perhaps photovoltaics, turning seawater into potable water, while feeding the State Water Project after local needs are met.”

In a trade publication, two city officials described the new desalting facility as a “ ‘unique ‘drought-proofing’ tool. It takes advantage of a virtually limitless resource--the ocean. . . . Desalinated ocean water is available regardless of rainfall patterns and without reducing supplies of other users or supplies needed to protect aquatic ecosystems.”

More than 80% of Santa Barbara’s voters had recommended in 1991 that desalination be made a permanent piece of the city water picture, but there was a catch.

In the same election, a majority also approved, albeit by a smaller margin, a measure to plug into the proposed Central Coast branch of the State Water Project, the system of dams, canals and ditches that carries northern river water south.

With these votes, Santa Barbara had turned itself into the municipal equivalent of the overprepared engineer who heads out of the house wearing both suspenders and belt. Or, as one environmentalist here describes it: “We ordered from both sides of the menu.”

This overzealousness was understandable. Residents were under orders to quit watering lawns. Water cops patrolled the streets. One of the two reservoirs that supply the city with water from natural runoff was dry, the other reduced to a pond.

The conditions were ripe for those who believed that the Central Coast could no longer afford to rely on rainfall and instead should dip its straw into the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

Previous efforts had been rebuffed by slow-growth advocates who saw “project” water as a lubricant for sprawl. In drought, their warnings were overwhelmed by the cries for water--water from desalting, water from the Feather River, any water.

With both sources approved, comparative economics came into play. State water undercut the logic behind the desalting plant. Although the facility would be paid off within five years, the energy required to pump seawater through purifying membranes--a process called reverse osmosis--made it expensive to operate. The city estimates that at present it would cost $1,100 to produce an acre-foot of water at the plant.

The price, meanwhile, for water from the state project hook-up, completed about three years ago, is roughly $1,500 an acre-foot. All but a few hundred dollars of this figure goes toward paying the city’s share of the bill for the 102-mile piping system--a 35-year debt obligation. This is money that must be paid, even if the city does not order a drop of its annual allotment of 3,000 acre-feet.

As a result, Santa Barbara has determined that in a pinch it will rely first on state water--again, in essence, it already is being paid for--before turning to desalination. At this point, the question is more than academic: Since the drought ended, Santa Barbara has yet to draw water from either the desalination plant or the State Water Project. Why?

For starters, rainfall has been consistent, filling reservoirs and ground-water basins. Moreover, consumption has not returned to pre-drought levels. Even with the rains, residents have not abandoned conservation practices and tools.

Many have apparently noticed that their water bills--Santa Barbara’s rates are considered to be among the state’s highest--have been adjusted upward to pay for the new hardware. First they needed to pay for the desalination plant, and now they must pay for the state pipeline (referred to by its detractors as “the ditch”). And the surest way to reduce an individual water bill is to use less water, further decreasing demand.

In a 1996 white paper on the desalination plant, two city officials said: “Analysis of city supplies shows that the city will not need supplies from desalination, even in a repeat of the most severe drought of record, until [citywide] demand is above 15,000” acre-feet a year. And that level of demand, they concluded, “should not happen until well into the next century.”

There are water policy experts who see larger lessons in Santa Barbara’s dance with the white elephants.

As Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank, has concluded: “That desalination plant is a symbol of the failure of comprehensive California water policy. If we really thought about water comprehensively, that plant never would have been built. . . . The world has changed, in my opinion. The way to deal with a water problem is no longer to seek out new supply, but to address the way we use water, to look at conservation and efficiency.”

Water debate in California tends to travel a familiar track. Agrarians complain of “regulated drought,” and demand more storage. Environmentalists point to dwindling fish counts, and call for less diversion for irrigation and subdivisions. The urban water agencies, meanwhile, try to sense which side is winning, and make friends.

In this timeless wrangle, desalination is regarded as something freakish, unnatural--as opposed, say, to making fish climb ladders over Sierra Nevada dams.

Earlier this year, Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, found himself waiting to testify about water before a legislative committee in Sacramento. He kept hearing the same old battle cries: farmers versus fish, reservoirs versus rivers. When his turn came, Grader put aside his prepared text.

Forget about new dams, he declared. “The best bet in the long term is going to be desalination.”

He did not win the day.

“Denial,” Grader said later, “is still the biggest river running through California. There were a lot of people coming up with every reason why it couldn’t be done.”

Plant Performed Well in Trials

In fact, though its operative history was brief, the Santa Barbara facility--a tidy, low-slung layout of control rooms, pipes, tanks and trailers, painted in naval hues and located in a largely industrial neighborhood near the beach--did perform well. It produced 419 acre-feet of water and only a few hitches.

The current mayor recalls a complaint by a City Hall secretary that the soft water made her hair unmanageable. A microbrewery reported that the water ruined its beer. As for taste, a city report said: “The city received customer taste complaints, although it was our observation that many complaints were from areas not receiving any desalted water.”

Before the plant was sentenced to long-term storage, there was hopeful talk of making water for transfer--either by actual pipe or through paper trading of rights--to thirstier regions. Las Vegas was discussed early on as a potential customer. Nothing ever came of it.

Said Santa Barbara official Roebuck: “It all boils down to economics.” As long as Central Valley farmers can buy or sell water for $100 or $200 an acre-foot, he said, there will be no market for desalted water costing 10 times as much. Still, he and others in city government cling--for public consumption anyway--to the belief that some dry day the decision to build the Santa Barbara plant will prove to have been prophetic.

Standing at the center of the facility, watching traffic roar past on U.S. 101, Roebuck said: “You never know. Maybe in the future, this facility is going to be our first line of production, rather than the last.”

As he spoke, a pump whirred away nearby, sucking puddles of rainwater out of the plant works.