By: Libi Uremovic | Original Article at Patch.com
Transcript from Nathan Miller on Behalf of the Building Industry Association at the Beaumont-Cherry Valley Water District 09/10/14 Workshop
Nathan Miller, on behalf of the Building Industry Association: I want to thank the Board for putting this workshop in place. I think it’s absolutely valuable for you as a Board, for us Stakeholders, and Residents in the Community to have an opportunity to air some grievences. Clearly these meetings can be a magnet for folks that are significately concerned about the situation.
I would say that the media hasn’t necessarily been favorable in terms of minimizing the hype – they’ve definately hyped this scare of the drought that we’re experiencing right now. I do want to cover a few basic facts about it. First of all, the worse drought we’ve experienced in history was actually in the 70’s. This isn’t as bad as that one.
However, the allocation of water afforded to us, as I’m sure many people on the Board are aware of, is different because the priorties of the State with regards to water allocations are different now. They’ve made Santa Ana and the Delta smelt more of a priority than sending it down into Southern California and to agriculture. And really the people that are hurting the most right now are those in Central California where their farms and their livehoods have been taken away from them. That’s incredibly unfortunate.
With regard to the Metropolitian Water District’s storage that they have, and that doesn’t include the water basin here, they have about 3 to 4 years of stored water if it doesn’t rain for the next 3 or 4 years and god forbid that be the case our problems are much bigger than just dealing with building right now. Not having water would be pretty significant.
There’s an article that came out not too long ago in the Press Enterprise where it covers this topic: Why building in a time of drought? And what it highlighted is that because of improved efficiency standards; low flow toilets, drought tolerant landscaping, new development is actually has little to no impact on the increased demand for water especially in cases where new development replaces old development. Because older developments, a lot of the homes where folks are living right now are actually significant water users because those elements weren’t put into place at the time.
But new development has actually been ahead of the game. We see where our water needs have gone and a lot of these problems would have been aleviated clearly if the State had done its job two decades ago and put into place plans that brought water down to Southern California. Southern California being the State’s economic engine in terms of its functionality. But new developments increase in water demands relatively flat. There are bigger demands for agriculture and industrial and we’re definately not arguing that that needs to be curtailed.
The drought is real and it’s absolutely vital that the builders, that the commercial folks, that the homeowners, everyone does their part to conserve our resources in order to preserve our livelyhood here and there’s no argument with that.
And the reason I’m here on behalf of the Building Industry is, as when I was here at the last meeting, we want to be ahead of the game and we want to reach out to you in advance and this is obviously one of the great ways for us to have this conversation of looking at other ways, increased measures that we can have tigher restrictions on draught tolerant landscape so we can save water even more because this may or may not be the end of the drought.
We may have an El Nino, we may not. Maybe we wil another year, you know, in terms of the history of Southern California and the duration of the droughts we’ve experenced; they’ve been all over the map. We want to be partners the District and Community. Developers and Builders built all the homes that everyone is sitting here in these halls right now live in and I’m sure a lot of people appreicate their homes and there’s other people that want to come to this community because they like the lifestyle this community offers.
With that being said, obviously with what’s going on right now, there’s obviously due process involved for developers that are currently building. There already are agreements that can’t be taken away. There are legal complications that, and I think it was brought up last time with regard to reclaimed water, it’s unfortunate that there isn’t reclaimed water running through those (purple) pipes, but to make an assertion that you can only use non-potable water when non-potable water isn’t an option would create some due process complications as well.
So that’s why we’re here. We want to actually work with you and do whatever we can to do our part and and for members to do your part in order to try and conserve water and be further ahead of the game. This is what they’ve been doing for the last, for quite a few years. And again, we are appreciative that we get to have this collaborative process. I do imagine that everybody here wants to have a constructive conversation about what the situation truely is and where everyone stands in it. We all want to work together with each other. I don’t think anyone here is the enemy.
With regard to will-serve letters. Obviously there is a process involved in that where a study needs to be take place, statistical information needs to show there actually is a direct severe need in order to do that. To date we haven’t seen that. And we would like to work with you in terms of providing you with information as to how development has impacted this region.