KUSP Reports: Environment

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* Normal Sources:  San Lorenzo River + Loch Lomond, etc.
** Other Sources: Using treated waste water to provide fish habitat; Increased restrictions to water customers; Transfers from a proposed county-wide network of water districts.

By Wes Sims | KUSP News -

It might seem ironic that the most visible symbol of the Santa Cruz Water Department is not the San Lorenzo River, from which the city’s drinking water is drawn. But it’s the tanks and towers of the city’s waste water treatment plant at Neary Lagoon. Jim Bentley, a former superintendent for water production for the city hopes the treated waste water could contribute to a solution to Santa Cruz’s water supply problem.

“The water leaving a tertiary waste water treatment plant, that removes all the solids, that removes nitrogen, it’s put out in the ocean a very clear looking water, disinfected, there would be very low coliform count in it,” Bentley says.

Currently the city’s plant does not achieve a tertiary degree of treatment, and using waste water for drinking purposes is illegal. But the city of Santa Cruz does have a legal obligation to provide adequate water for threatened fish. Recently regulators increased the amount of water the city would have to leave in to river for fish during a drought. Bentley believes waste water added downstream from the municipal water supply can meet the habitat obligation. This is one of the sources he hopes the city can use instead of desalination.

“The city has a three-legged, that’s the city’s words, theirs is a three-legged stool based on curtailment, conservation, and desalination,” Bentley says.” Well, we have a multi-legged stool. We would expect more conservation than the city’s asking for right now.”

The Challenge for the SCWD: A 2-Year Drought

Leading the push for desalination is Santa Cruz Water Director Bill Kocher. He’s forged a joint operating agreement with the Soquel Creek Water District for a desalination plant that would address Soquel’s over-drafted groundwater basin, and the big issue that’s driving the narrative for Santa Cruz: the threat of a two-year drought. Kocher says if Santa Cruz were to go through another drought like 1976 and 77, the average homeowner would have to cut water usage by half during the second year.

“We’re not particularly worried about winter,” Kocher says.”But we’re worried about a 210-day period in the summer in droughts. And so we need a project that will give us water when we need water.”

Measure P organizer Rick Longinotti questions the process.

“The city of Santa Cruz in 2005 set on desalination as their preferred options,” he says. “ And since that time they haven’t spent any time or money investigating alternatives, and so we’re trying to re-open that discussion.”

Cutting Back Earlier

Longinotti says the city’s worst case scenario is based on an operations policy in which there is no attempt to cut back on water usage during normal or mildly dry years, or maintain an adequate backup supply in Loch Lomond Reservoir.

Longinotti hopes to : “turn the city’s attention more to what can be done instead of desalination.”

Bentley: “We would also suggest that the city’s water customers are willing to do more curtailment than the city is expecting of them.”

When the city asks, residents use less water. Longinotti says last year, when the city asked for restrictions, residents saved enough so that if a severe drought had begun this year the city would have started about fourteen hundred acre feet ahead of its worst case scenario. That’s about what the city hopes to produce in a drought with a desalination plant. Longinotti notes the desal plan ignores potential supply from a multi-district water network under consideration.

Santa Cruz Water Director Bill Kocher says the city has considered its options and a desalination plant is the only plan that meets its needs.

“We’ve looked at the environmental implications, we’ve looked at cost,” Kocher says.” We’ve looked at ways we can minimize and mitigate environmental impacts, including marine issues, including energy, greenhouse gas emissions cost.”

The next step for the City of Santa Cruz is an environmental impact report. If that is certified by the end of the year, voters could decide the issue the following year. Kocher expects the earliest a desalination plant could be producing water would be 2016.

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By Wes Sims | KUSP News -
“This is Ocean Street Extension and the river doesn’t always look or sound like this, but in a nice winter like this one, it’s a rather nice little sound,” says Santa Cruz Water Director Bill Kocher as we walked along the banks of the San Lorenzo River, the primary source of the city’s water supply.

“And if 90,000 acre feet moved down this river in one year that’s considered an average year. And already, from last October, we’re at 40,000 acre feet.”

An acre-foot is the volume of water that would cover an acre to a depth of a foot. Santa Cruz’s water district uses about 11,000 acre feet in a typical year. Usually the San Lorenzo River and the city’s wells provide enough. In dry years, the district has to let enough water flow down the river for fish to survive. Due to a recent order from the state, the amount or river water reserved for fish in dry years has increased. Meanwhile, the district can only take a limited amount from wells.

“If we had a drought today that looked like ’76-’77, we would be about 50% short for the average homeowner,” Kocher explains. “Just in terms of bathing, in terms of toilet flushing, in terms of outdoor irrigation, whatever they use water for. If they could imagine having half that amount available to them, that’s what would happen in a critically dry year.”

Dry Years are Where the Problem Lies

By imposing restrictions on water users, Kocher says the district can get usage down to about 9,500 acre feet. But the supply from the river and wells could fall 1,400 acre feet short.

“There’s really two things going on,” Kocher says. “One is that we are doing OK now in normal years. We’re not doing OK now in dry and critically dry years.”

Kocher’s plan has been to fill this drought-year gap with water from a 150 million-dollar desalination plant whose cost would be split with the Soquel Creek Water District. That district needs a new source to replace its well water supply or risk losing its wells to seawater intrusion. So during droughts, the Santa Cruz District would use the desalinated water to make up its supply gap. The rest of the time, the plant would provide water for the Soquel District. Taj Dufour, acting general manager for the Soquel Creek District explains the arrangement:

“Our plans are to pump this as frequently as we could to reduce our draw on the groundwater basin. And when the city needs it they would be in charge. So basically, whichever agency is using the plant would be responsible for the operational costs.”

A Rare Example of Cooperation

“In an era when you have two houses of congress that can’t talk across the aisle, it’s sort of a model for inter-agency, intergovernmental agency cooperation,” Kocher says.

But there’s plenty of disagreement outside the business model between the City of Santa Cruz and the Soquel Creek District. Santa Cruz voters in the November 2012 general election approved Measure P, requiring a future city-wide vote before the City of Santa Cruz can authorize a desalination plant. One of the organizers of Measure P was former electrical contractor Rick Longinotti, who is concerned in part about the contribution a plant would make to the district’s greenhouse gas footprint.

“it’s twelve times the energy to produce a gallon of water as our current water supply,” Longinotti says.

Longinotti wants the city to make more ambitious restrictions on water usage in dry years, rather than building a desalination plant.

Tomorrow during Morning Edition and All Things Considered we look at some of the ways desalination opponents propose for supplying water in droughts.

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By Wes Sims
Wells around the Monterey Bay are causing sea water to pollute aquifers. Endangered fish need more water than water districts are leaving in streams. And more than one district is looking to desalination for a new supply. KUSP’s Wes Sims reports a ballot measure in Santa Cruz would force the city to ask voters if it can build the desal plant it wants.

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Jonathan Trent's OMEGA project aims to create bio-fuel while collecting carbon from the atmosphere, releasing oxygen and purifying municipal waste water. Image: NASA.gov

By Wes Sims

NASA’s primary mission is the study and exploration of outer space. But the end of the space shuttle program and a series of budget cuts are shifting much of the agency’s focus to planet earth. In 2007, NASA Ames scientist Jonathan Trent laid the ground work for a 10-million dollar 2-year research project known as OMEGA.

“So, OMEGA stands for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae, an outgrowth of a project I started called, Sustainable Energy for Planet Earth,” Trent says.  ”Because a lot of the politicians of the time were saying, we need an Apollo mission for energy.”

Until the project ended in May, OMEGA was housed at the California Fish & Game office near Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz.  The idea behind OMEGA is to grow micro-algae in treated waste-water that flows into the ocean bays of coastal cities as a way of creating new sources of bio-fuel.

“The reason algae are so interesting for bio-fuels,” Trent says, “and the reason I came up with the idea of growing micro algae is because, A: micro-algae are about a hundred times better than soy in producing bio-diesel, cause they make so much oil they store oil, and, B: most of the oil we currently harvest from the deep earth as fossil oil, came from micro-algae that lived millions of years ago.”

The motivation behind OMEGA is America’s voracious appetite for energy, in comparison with the rest of the world.

“Right now the United States represents less than 5% of the world’s population and uses over 25% of the world’s resources. India, which represents about 17% of the world’s population, uses less than 4% of the world’s resources,” Trent says. “If all the people in India lived like we do in the United States, they alone would use 95% of the world’s resources. If China, which is 19% of the world’s population, China and India lived like we do, it would take almost three planet earths to support that life style. ‘And China’s getting there.’ China and India both are looking in this direction and thinking, gee, we’d like to be able to have this kind of luxurious life style.”

So what’s next for OMEGA?

“It’s not clear to me, given all the budget cuts, whether NASA will continue to fund this. But it is clear to me that other places in the world are looking very seriously at picking up on the notion of doing an offshore system,” he says.

That’s why Jonathan Trent is speaking at TED conferences. Standing for technology, entertainment, and design, TED is a non-profit organization devoted to … quote …ideas worth spreading. A recent TED-Global appearance in Scotland, followed an earlier presentation at TEDx Santa Cruz, which Trent concluded by referencing the analogy of earth as a ship soaring through space.

“But I want to remember and remind you that we’re not passengers on spaceship earth. We’re the crew.”

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Photo: Kaometet / flickr

By Wes Sims

At issue is whether cities and counties have the authority to ban single-use plastic bags from grocery and retail stores, to keep them from reaching the ocean, where they can be ingested by marine wildlife. Plastic bag-bans began in San Francisco, and spread through Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties, all the way to Los Angeles.  Why does Stephen Joseph care? A 2008 founding document states that the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition includes plastic bag manufacturers, plastic bag distributors, retailers, and concerned citizens.  But the current website says the Coalition is totally independent and … quote … the only organization that is questioning and challenging misinformation, myths, exaggerations, and hype spread by anti-plastic bag activists.  The page also declares that environmental policy should be based on facts.  Fair enough!  So in this report, we go to the academic community to examine specific claims from Stephen Joseph.

Joseph told us: “the worst case that we have seen of mis-information is in Santa Cruz County.”

“For instance,” he said. “They say that plastic bags that are used in this country use over 12-million barrels of oil in their production. That assumes that plastic bags are made of oil.  Plastic bags are not made of oil. It’s a total myth.“

To answer this question, we went to U.C. Santa Cruz to speak with Dr. Rebecca Braslau; a chemistry professor who specializes in organic polymers and plastics.

“Plastic bags are made of polyethylene, and the grocery-type bags are high-density polyethylene,” Braslau said. “And they are made exclusively from ethylene, which is a small organic molecule and all of the ethylene production in the world comes ultimately from fossil fuels.”

We also asked Professor Braslau about Joseph’s challenge of a statement from Santa Cruz County that plastic bits in the ocean … not bags, but bits absorb dangerous compounds …

“In an aqua environment of the ocean, anything that’s a greasy molecule, and polyethylene is very greasy compared to water, it’s what we call hydrophobic,“ she said. “I would expect that polyethylene bag bits would absorb organic hydrocarbons that shouldn’t be in the aqua environment.”

As to the danger posed by plastic bags, Stephen Joseph sites a London Times article that marine mammals are being killed by discarded fishing nets.  But a UC Santa Cruz marine biologist says plastic bags don’t get a free pass.

Dr. Terrie Williams is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.  Her office is at Long Marine Lab, which invites children to visit the outdoor sea pools where Professor Williams does some of her research.

“I’ve seen bags around the necks of pinnipeds, you know, sea lions and seals,” Williams said. “And even on one occasion, was at the necropsy of a sperm whale that had come up in Hawaii on the beach and we had to determine cause of death. The cause of death in that case after I reached my arm into the stomach of this animal was plastic debris in the stomach and it eventually caused the animal to starve and then die.”

And finally, there’s Stephen Joseph’s primary complaint with the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors:

“They know that they based their ban on misinformation but they simply don’t care. “

District 4 County Supervisor Ellen Pirie said:  “I’m very interested in getting accurate information. But what was important to me was really the undisputed fact that the plastic bags end up as litter all over our county, and many end up in the ocean where they do a great deal of damage.“

The debate may not be over, but more than two months after the plastic bag ban went into effect in Santa Cruz County, bringing your own bags into grocery and retail stores, is the new normal.

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A Save Our Shores mural at the Safeway in Aptos aims to save shopper the trouble of arriving at the check stand without reusable bags. Photo: Wes Sims

By Wes Sims

Grocery shopping in unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County has changed since late March, when a ban on single-use plastic bags went into effect.  Customers of the Aptos Safeway store are now expected to bring their own bags or pay 10-cents apiece for paper bags … a price that will go up in the future, until shoppers get the message that  plastic, and to a lesser degree, paper, can be environmentally hazardous.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ellen Pirie represents a large mid-county district that stretches from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the shores of Monterey Bay.

“Plastic bags often find their way into the ocean. Some of the fish eat them, they get caught up in things, they can really do a lot of damage,” Pirie Says.

Spearheading the effort to ban single-use plastic bags is Save Our Shore; a non-profit organization focused on keeping harmful products from reaching the ocean. 

“Our goal at Save our Shores is to get every jurisdiction around our sanctuary to have bans on Styrofoam and plastic bags,” says Save Our Shores executive director Laura Kasa.

“Sanctuary” refers to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary … 276 miles of federally protected off-shore water stretching from Cambria to north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

San Francisco was one of the first cities to actually put forth a ban.  And now they’re finding resistance from Stephen Joseph and the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, trying to fight them on that.”   

San Francisco attorney Stephen Joseph represents a long list of plastics and packaging companies which oppose restrictions on plastic bags. 

“We oppose plastic bag bans for a number of reasons.  The primary reason is that the bag have been based on mis-information.  And in fact the worst case that we have seen of mis-information is in Santa Cruz County, ” Joseph says. “For instance, the Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors say that the production of disposable plastic bags causes the deaths of thousands of marine mammals each year. That is not true. The London Times exposes as a myth.  It is based upon a typographical error. The report on which it’s supposed to be based never mentioned plastic bags.  It says that the mammals are being killed by discarded fishing nets.”

Lawsuits filed by Stephen Joseph are the reason that restaurants can still put “to-go” orders in Styrofoam containers and plastic bags in Santa Cruz County.  Joseph promised to drop his challenge to the plastic bag ban, as long as the county agreed to exempt restaurants.

“So what the county decided to do was say, ok, we’ll take the restaurant piece out. We’ll separate it out. And then we’re going to go back and add the restaurants in later, so that if he wants to sue us, it’ll just be on that restaurant piece. ” Kasa says

Environmentalist, Dan Haifley headed-up Save Our Shores back in the 1990’s.  He says it’s a matter of getting back to things that are re-usable, and not harmful to the environment.

“Thirty, forty years ago we all used re-usable bags to go shopping with.  You go back even a hundred years.  People carried a basket to carry their items in. And we can go back to doing that and there can be an industry in this and it can create jobs,” Haifley says.

Meanwhile, back at the Aptos Safeway. A checker offers a customer assistance carrying groceries to her car.

“We don’t charge for that,” she says.

The customer replies, “You’re not charging for that? Thank god!”