Costs, Delays to Water Plan Vex Councilwoman

An additional $50,000 will be spent by the local water authority to produce a new management plan for the San Juan Basin, a drainage area that feeds San Juan Capistrano and its neighboring communities.

The plan could be an impetuous for the city to request a bump in its allocation, and make the authority that oversees the reservoir a bigger player in the regional water arena, its members have said.

But the plan was due in July and already cost about $350,000. The new estimated completion time is September 2012.

The setbacks vexed a San Juan Capistrano City Councilwoman, the city's representative at the San Juan Basin Authority. Delegates from the Moulton Niguel, South Coast and Santa Margarita water districts also make up the authority's governing board.

"This is a bad situation and I’m not happy about it," Councilwoman Laura Freese said before approving the additional costs on Oct. 11.

The consultants producing the report, Wildermuth Environmental, Inc., said the management plan hinges on data from the Metropolitan Water District of Orange County that will show how much basin water can be drawn without tapping the aquifer entirely.

According to president Mark Wildermuth, getting accurate data has taken longer than he expected.

Ultimately, Freese and the other authority directors agreed that their hands were tied, with one calling the additional $50,000 "modest in comparison to the size of the investment."

The management plan will also tell the Basin Authority how to protect the existing water supply and the amount it needs to recharge. Authority representatives said they can use the information to work more closely with other Southern California water groups.

For the city of San Juan Capistrano, the management plan could be key to asking for the rights to more water. For first the time in several years, its groundwater treatment plant is pumping near its current maximum allotment.

Local leaders have come under fire in the past for investing heavily in the treatment plant even as it hasn't met its goal of eliminating San Juan Capistrano's reliance on imported water.

City officials have blamed past low production on the shutdown of two wells in the wake of  contamination from a MTBE leak wrought by Chevron.

Now that treating the gasoline additive, .

There were two days in October when the city relied solely on the local supply without having to import water from the Metropolitan Water District.

"There's always been a question of whether we can do it," San Juan Capistrano's Assistant Director of Utilities West Curry said Tuesday about operating the plant at full capacity. "Now the question is how much water can we extract from the basin—which is the purpose of the groundwater management plan from Wildermuth."

In October, the plant produced a daily average of 4 million gallons. The city's quota is 5.2 million gallons.

Curry said he expects the current average to increase in the spring if the City Council approves spending $250,000 this month to repair two broken green sand filters that treat high levels of iron and manganese.