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by John Earl, crossposted from Surf City Voice.
Orange County taxpayers may have to pay a lot more for a $1 billion Huntington Beach ocean desalination plant if the Mesa Water District gets its way. (See Mesa’s recent POLL.)
For the past decade the developer, Poseidon Resources, has promised taxpayers they won’t have to pay a cent for construction of the desal plant, which would create about 56,000 acre-feet of pricey drinking water every year, if approved.
The tax truth came out unexpectedly at a special Mesa Water board meeting held June 27 to promote the Poseidon project’s supposed benefits.
About 100 Mesa area residents were in the audience.
Invited speaker Robert Sulnick made Poseidon’s case during a 20-minute presentation.
Opponents of the desal plant were not invited to speak.
Sulnick was introduced as an environmental attorney and the executive director of OC WISE–with no mention (until questioned by this reporter after his presentation) that the group is a Poseidon front of developers and that he is one of Poseidon’s paid consultants.
A member of the audience questioned Sulnick about a survey mailed by Mesa Water asking her opinion of a ballot initiative to increase property taxes by $89 in order to pay for the desal plant.
Mesa’s public relations officer, Stacy Taylor, who was facilitating, was caught by surprise and so was Sulnick.
“Robert, you wouldn’t know anything about that,” Taylor said.
“I don’t know anything about it, but I was going to make up an answer,” Sulnick joked in return.
Laughter ensured, but the 11-question survey is no joke. It was sent with a two-page “Information Fact Sheet” explaining that project funding “could come from different sources” including “a ballot measure that would require two-thirds voter approval.”
The mailer mixes hotly disputed assertions, such as calling the project “environmentally sensitive and cost-effective”, with leading questions.
For example, respondents are asked if each of the 11 assertions “makes you more or less likely to support the tax” based on the assumption that:
Poseidon’s Robert Sulnick and Mesa Water’s Stacy Taylor have a laugh over Mesa’s proposed tax increase. Photo from video: John Earl
“Investment in a desalination project makes sense for Orange County – it is a cost-effective, long-term solution to our local water supply challenges.”
The so-called fact sheet explains that to make Poseidon’s project cost-effective “a potential ballot measure could provide funding for the reliability surcharge and construction of additional distribution systems throughout the groundwater basin rather than a rate increase on your water bill.”
Taylor said that the survey was sent to 6,000 Mesa Water ratepayers and that she was told it was conducted by “one of the best ballot initiative companies in the state of California”.
She didn’t know the company’s name, how much the survey cost or who paid for it. But said she would be happy to provide that information and agreed it “was a very good idea” to post that information on the Mesa website.
The survey itself was already posted on the website, but the cost information remains unpublished at press time.
The Orange County Water District, but not Mesa Water, is negotiating a contract with Poseidon.
OCWD manages the county’s groundwater basin from which 19 north-county water retail agencies, including Mesa, pump at least 70 percent of their drinking water.
OCWD General Manager Mike Marcus told the Voice by email that Mesa acted on its own and announced the survey at an early-morning OCWD board meeting on June 10.
Mesa Water supplies 108,000 residents of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach with water from a small part of the groundwater basin.
The agency brags about its own “drought proof” and “100 percent” self-sufficient water supply; thus, it has no need for the 56,000 acre feet of imported water that Poseidon’s desalinated water would replace—at three times the cost–in order to receive a $399 million government subsidy required to make the project viable to private investors.
But the small water agency has long sought to influence the debate over the proposed desalination project and to promote desalination in general, working closely with Poseidon to do that.
In 2010, Mesa Water founded CalDesal, a non-profit lobbying organization funded by the desal industry and public water agencies.
Since then, Mesa Water board president Shawn Dewane has been CalDesal’s president. Dewane also serves on the OCWD Board of Directors.
Critics of the project never took the no-tax promise seriously, in part because of Poseidon’s insistence on receiving the subsidy.
And recently Poseidon and OCWD tentatively agreed that the water agency would pay for the infrastructure needed to deliver the desalinated water, a public cost that could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.
But on its website Poseidon still promises that its desal plant will be built “At no cost to taxpayers”.
The majority of the Huntington Beach City Council members who approved local permits for the project in 2006 accepted at face value Poseidon’s promise of private-only funding.
“We’re going to need the water”, Council Member Don Hansen said at the time. “It’s not us building the plant. It’s all private investment.”
A final contract proposal with Poseidon is expected to come before the OCWD Board of Directors by the end of the year.
There’s a lot to unpack and digest in this piece. I have three main thoughts:
1. The property-tax-increase trial balloon included in last month’s strange Mesa Water poll. Remember how Mr. Earl recently revealed that Poseidon will provide North Orange County with no new water, because to protect their “reliability” (by which they mean profitability) they are counting on a $399 million subsidy from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET), and the conditions of that subsidy are that any water Poseidon provides the district will no longer be provided by the MET.
So we wonder, what’s the idea behind this proposed tax? Would it REPLACE that MET subsidy so that we do indeed get some extra water from Poseidon… or would it be IN ADDITION to that MET subsidy, so that we are spending even more, Poseidon’s profits are EVEN HIGHER, and we’re still getting no new water? Sadly, there is nobody willing and able to answer those questions, honestly or even otherwise. This is how opaque things are in OC’s water world right now.
Whenever I refer to John as “Mr. Earl,” this silly song starts going through my head:
It has nothing to do with the LRP subsidy. It’s just a scheme to manipulate the public into paying the higher water rates that were already part of the plan, including the probably hundreds of millions for construction of the distribution system that OCWD staff and Director Harry Sidhu said they wouldn’t build because it would be pointless to put the desal water into the ground.
2. What is the role of the Mesa Water District in the Poseidon debate, the Mesa Water District featuring both the compromised, ubiquitous Shawn Dewane and the bizarre proselytizer Jim Fisler? On the one hand Mesa is one of the water “providers” in the area covered by the OCWD, none of whom have signed on to buy Poseidon’s expensive water, because none of them – particularly Mesa – NEED that water.
And yet the majority of that district’s directors – particularly Dewane, Fisler, and Ethan Temianka – tirelessly shill for Poseidon, despite not needing the water. How does this make sense, and how can these directors pretend to be looking out for the ratepayers of their district?
Anyway, it seems unlikely, given Poseidon’s closeness to these members, that Poseidon has nothing to do with the property tax increase idea.
Oh also, while I doubt a property tax increase for a Poseidon plant would ever get the required 2/3 vote, it’s gotta be a black eye to Poseidon that the idea is being bandied about. It just rubs in the fact that Poseidon is going to cost you and me a lot of money, doesn’t it?
3. Some of us determined months ago that OCWISE is an Astroturf group created by Poseidon, and that their main spokesman, “environmental attorney” Robert Sulnick, has a record as a professional “greenwasher,” lending his reputation as an environmentalist to any company that will pay him. It’s not like Poseidon bothered to cover their tracks when creating OCWISE this spring; “Whois” shows their website to have been registered by Arianna Barrios, the wife and boss (as owner of “IdeaLAB”) of Poseidon’s chief consultant Brian Lochrie.
But how perfect is it that the folksy Mr. Sulnick, in his perpetual cowboy boots, would joke, “I don’t know anything about it, but I was going to make up an answer.” (And that his sympathetic audience would find that hilarious.) That is what a professional faux environmentalist is paid to do, after all, just “make something up.” Mr. Sulnick should have those words hung around his neck for the rest of his career: Robert “I’ll just make something up” Sulnick.
*Chairman Vern, you are talking process not project. Little doubt that the process and the various elements included are divisive, sometime unnecessary and many time downright ridiculous. The project however, is where the rubber meets the road and what is far more important than what is the best way to take cash out of the people’s pocket is what the production levels and cost per acre projections are and what happens when those numbers are either met or not met. We need both senarios first – otherwise we are talking about Jeff Skillings in 1999 talking about some Hedge Fund to determine the number of sunny days that Washington D.C. will have in 2000! Or in this case; Huntington Beach in 2016! So, when do we break ground, when is the completion date and when do we get our first bottle of water from the Poseidon plant?
As usual there is so much you don’t get, or don’t want to get. This project was supposed to be built with no public money, but they are scrounging around looking for ANY way they can get their hands on public money to make their project more profitable for their investors.
James Joyce, meet Abbott and Costello.
*We recently saw that: Hu’s on first.
“Oh, he’s our shortstop.”