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INTRO BY VERN: Easy-going and honest OCWD Director Phil Anthony, who represents the western one-third of Garden Grove on the water board and who was one of only three directors (out of ten) to vote against the Poseidon term-sheet, proudly attended last night’s Garden Grove forum on the issue, sitting in the front row, answering questions and meeting folks afterward.
In stark contrast, the woman who represents the remaining 2/3 of the town, longtime Councilwoman Dina Nguyen, who voted in Poseidon’s favor, couldn’t be bothered to make the event, face her constituents and explain her vote, even though she SAID SHE WOULD BE THERE. Just like when she gave me her number when she got on the board and said she’d talk to me any time, but has stonewalled me ever since. (Apart from some strange cryptic texts she sent me about Chinese foot-binding.)
She did show up for her first meeting without a clue; I ran into her in the parking lot and had to show her where the meeting was being held. (Pretty different from the two folks she ran against, who had attended plenty of meetings in preparation!) I asked her to try to keep a “healthy skepticism” about Poseidon and she vowed she would. Yeah right. 
Seated next to ruby-red Poseidon dead-ender Steve Sheldon (the old scourge of Garden Grove’s downtown),she has learned to echo his every position, as they whisper and giggle together like girlfriends.
We’ve covered Dina for a long time on this blog, long before I was here, and my expectations were never high for her. (But then – I try to keep an open mind, for I had no reason to suspect that Jan Flory would turn out to be so astoundingly great on the Board!) Dina, sadly, is as Dina has always been – a woman of very limited intelligence and independence who knows exactly who butters her bread. We only recently uncovered the $11,000 Poseidon funnelled to her through the “California Homeowners Association” for her 2014 campaign, and now she is a charter member of the Poseidon Seven, and would probably have a hard time explaining why.
All by way of introduction to John Earl’s excellent report from the Garden Grove event:
Garden Grove Desal Forum Tackles Issues Suppressed by OCWD
By John Earl, Surf City Voice (Video of forum posted below)
A public forum held by Garden Grove mayor Bao Nguyen last night at the city’s community center examined the cost of and alternatives to a proposed $1 billion ocean desalination plant promoted by the Orange County Water District.
Unnamed GG water official, Peer Swan, Ray Hiemstra, Debbie Cook, GG Mayor Bao Nguyen.
Those issues – and the panel of local experts who discussed them last night – have been all but ignored by most of the OCWD Board of Directors, some of whom have strong financial and political ties to Poseidon Resources Inc., the company that would build the plant, and its big-business allies.
The OCWD maintains the county’s groundwater basin, which holds 66 million acre-feet of water and provides about 70 percent of the water used in central and northern Orange County, serving 2.3 million people.
For the past 18 months a clique of four board members, Cathy Green, Shawn Dewane, Stephen Sheldon, and Denis Bilodeau, joined last January by former Garden Grove Councilmember Dina Nguyen, have steered the District straight toward a long-term contract with Poseidon.
OCWD staff presented a proposed term sheet (pre-contract) to the board on May 14.
The board approved the term-sheet 7 -3. Nguyen voted for it.
Nguyen, who was the beneficiary of $11,000 in “independent expenditures” by a Poseidon-related PAC in her recent election to the OCWD board, was invited to participate in the forum but was a no-show.
Staff is now negotiating a contract with Poseidon that would lock the district into buying 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated ocean water per year, regardless of need, for the next half-century.
Poseidon’s water would cost about $2,000 an acre-foot out the door, more than 3 times what OCWD currently pays for the untreated water it imports from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET) to help maintain the county’s groundwater basin supply.
Poseidon and its allies on the OCWD board claim that its more expensive water would be a “reliability premium” akin to car insurance that would add to the county’s water supply portfolio and guarantee water during a drought.
Steve Sheldon and Dina Nguyen at right, May 14 OCWD meeting. (Harry Sidhu at left.) All three voted to negotiate a contract with Poseidon. Several Garden Grove residents attending the forum complained that Dina has always been unresponsive. She did not attend the forum.
But, in order to be financially viable, Poseidon is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in ratepayer-backed subsidies for the first 15 years of the contract. In return, MET rules require that Poseidon’s 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated water replace an equal amount of (cheaper) imported water, which would then be made available to water agencies outside of OCWD’s service area.
There would be no net gain in water supply for the district, which would be paying three times as much for Poseidon’s replacement water while subsidizing the cheaper imported water for other agencies. And the county wouldn’t receive more water during a drought.
This reporter has repeatedly asked Poseidon officials and OCWD directors to explain the benefit to ratepayers of paying three times as much for water than necessary and subsidizing cheaper water for ratepayers outside of Orange County, but to so far mum’s the word.
For the first 15 years, the proposed pricing scheme would pay Poseidon a surcharge of up to 20 percent on imported MET water (at the higher MWD treated rate) on top of a 3 percent annual compounded surcharge that recurs for the life of the contract, underlying subsequently declining variable surcharge rates.
A Surf City Voice review of the proposed pricing scheme shows that after 15 years ratepayers would pay up to $2,700 per acre-foot for Poseidon’s water (assuming the required $56,000 af) versus about $1,048 per acre-foot for untreated MET water, which comes out to about $1.8 billion versus about $700 million in total for that period.
That’s about $1.1 billion dollars that could be used for the cheaper and more efficient water supply alternatives ignored by OCWD and Poseidon but examined by the forum panel of experts.
Panel members were former Huntington Beach mayor Debbie Cook, Irvine Ranch Water District’s Peer Swan, Coastkeeper’s Ray Hiemstra, and Garden Grove water officials. Members of the public, including Westminster City Councilmember Diana Lee Carey, also spoke.
– See more at: http://www.surfcityvoice.org/2015/05/garden-grove-desal-forum-tackles-issues-suppressed-by-ocwd/
the reason she wasn’t there is because she was probably ….
[Ok Jose that’s enough now – ed.]
[You’re going to need better evidence of that sort of charge than your own say-so, Jose. Do you want to go do a proper investigative piece? Make sure it’s newsworthy, too. — Managing Ed.]
don’t edit my comment who do you think you are art pedroza?
If you’d prefer that your part of it be deleted, just say so.
She is adept at the buttering concept. Poseidon’s many flavors of saltfree butter!
*Wake up folks….sav Peer Swan and the duck comes down and gives you $200 dollars.
Evidently, Debbie Cook is not the pristine prize we thought she was. She needs to spend some time this year…visiting a summer house in upper Norway. Then she can learn how to fill the bucket of water from the lake and bring it up and use it to flush the toilet. That way she can get ready for life without Desal.
Your constant dribblings and burblings are an overflowing bucket…we are weary of your cloying misinformed musings.
*We gave them Bach and Leonardo. They gave us….the Message of the Winships! Did we say many things were…Lost in Translation and that we love Bill Murray?
Voyager out!
*Reality is like that. Sometimes it is upsetting, but we forgive you after all.
*One last thought….join the Girl Scouts….just don’t eat their toxic cookies.
what part of “Poseidon Provides No New Water for OCWD” don’t you understand?
Poseidon’s proposal is that OCWD rate payers should replace $700 MWD water with $2,000, lower quality[*] water from Poseidon. The cheaper, better water would then flow somewhere else….
[*] While desal water does meet all drinking standards, it does so just barely. The technial term, as OCWD engineers reminding the board at the last meeting, is “aggressive water” because it corrodes equipment and pipelines so much faster than that the current supply.
Yer on dicey ground here.
It’s pure water.
Pure is not a good thing, but qualifying it as “barely” meeting drinking standards is a bridge too far.
*Did Peer Swan tell you that? Let’s put it this way……all you Libertarian Robert Poole folks are all over it when it comes to Demand Management of anything. Well, what is your problem with water? If we can’t use our wells because the GRWS can’t keep up with demand, our ground water is being polluted in the beach areas from brackish inflow, if you need five gallons of water and can only get two…………from anyplace…..what makes you think your pals at the OCWD or IRWD which are connected at the hip…..don’t just raise they rates and then skim the market when they get the hedge? Back to basics folks…..more water is better because, communities cannot grow without sufficient water supplies. That simple. You are voting for higher rents, lower residential Real Estate prices and higher Commercial pricing just because cities offer different zoning which will favor the Commercial businesses.
NO ONE CAN UNDERSTAND YOU.
On the bright side, I don’t care.
If you are going to continue to comment and post on this site I am going to demand that you establish a much closer orbit. All the messages are coming in as complete nonsense.
oh, and just to remind folks — Poseidon paid for most of Dina’s campaign for OCWD Director– a position for which she had NO PRIOR EXPERIENCE.
I watched the video of the meeting. Thankfully it was somewhat of a fair presentation as compared to this article full of denigrating slights to those who don’t think like you (“correctly”). One of the main complaints seems to be the cost of local and reliable desal water which could add 10% to our water bill (though they never mention 10% but put up figures suggesting it will be much more). Left out of the conversation is the advocacy by anti desal people of tiered penalty rates on so called water wasters. They worry about a 10% increase for water reliability. They don’t blink an eye at raising rates 5 fold through tiers, some rates over 10 dollars a unit! IRWD is doubling down on their suspect rate structure. Will be interesting to see if a constituent feels this violates prop. 218. I have read their explanation of why they think the structure is legal but am not convinced it is.
*Let’s build it first….then complain. Without a working project…..what are we talking here? Thankfully, there has been so much conjecture over this project that the oversight will be very intense. The greatest cure to greed is open visability. We predict that all the “Ghost and Phantom stories about Desal” will slowly disperse…… as the supply rises and the cost is reduced.
We’re taking about a take or pay agreement, which means if it’s built, complaining is useless.
Pay attention.
Point of order, if this plant were here today, it would have exactly zero impact on usage reductions or penalty rates.
Zero.
So, all we’d be doing is adding 10% plus to existing rates and penalty rates for the sake of stupid.
Penalty rates are often touted of by anti Poseidon pholks. They are fine with those higher rates but not for water reliability. Prop 218 has spoken on penalty rates.
Non sequitur.
*Guess you guys have been getting ahead of the curve and just drinking sea water early…….before Desal. So, the concept is that Supply and Demand is meaningless when you are talking about OCWD, IRWD or GWRS? OK, now
we get it. Thanks for the clarification.
*In the California section of the LA Times today, you might review the polluted wells that are located in LA County. Almost all are polluted to one degree or another. The problem goes like this: As the water tables fall, the levels in the wells fall. The closer they get to the bottom of the well – the most heavy metals, pesticides, perchlorates and never ending poisons of one kind or another. Flushing your toilet with this water is fine. Just don’t use it to make rice or your morning oatmeal. The time has come to give up the so-called “Reasonable Deniability Factor” when it comes to Orange County water. If you think the LA water problem is strictly theirs – look at San Diego then. Or look out to the Inland Empire then. Then determine in your wisdom that we all live safely behind “The Orange Curtain” without water supply problems, without having to increase our supply, without having to pay more for water period. What did dad say
when we told him in high school that we wanted him to buy us a new Corvette? “You seem to be living in a dream world! So if you want one – go out and work for it!”.. he said.
John earl, I see your comment about he water being replaced by removing it from our allotment from MWD can you conform that or cut n paste the text of that in the contract?
It’s probably not in a contract with Poseidon but in some policy of MWD, or a new drought-time policy of the state. I’ll get John.
MWD policies, and not new ones. John is going to have an article documenting exactly that in a couple days; he’s been researching it for a while.