(Contributed photo)
WATSONVILLE — For decades, the water in the seasonal College Lake has been pumped into the Monterey Bay to allow for summer farming on the land.
The Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency sees the lake, located between Highway 152 and Paulsen Road, as an opportunity to help balance the valley’s over-drafted groundwater basin.
The agency has proposed the “College Lake Integrated Resources Management Project,” a project that would, among other things, build a water treatment plant at the lake as well as a 5.5-mile pipeline that would send the treated water to PV Water’s Coastal Distribution System on Clearwater Lane.
Now, PV Water is looking to the public for their ideas and concerns. The agency will hold two meetings on Tuesday, at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., at the Watsonville Civic Plaza Community Room, 275 Main St., fourth floor.
As part of the California Environmental Quality Review process, PV Water has released a Notice of Preparation to begin an environmental review process and will accept comments from the public through Jan. 5 at 5 p.m.
PV Water General Manager Brian Lockwood said the agency wants to be “as open and transparent as possible” throughout the process.
“We really want the public to be involved,” he said. “Community involvement is essential to the CEQA process and we invite the public to weigh in about what should be studied during the environmental review process.”
The proposed project is estimated to net 2,400 acre-feet of water for agricultural uses a year, or about 325,000 gallons.
Lockwood also estimated the cost of the entire project to be more than $30 million, and said the agency will pursue grant opportunities to help fund it.
After the public comment period wraps up on Jan. 5 for the “scoping” portion of the process, the draft environmental impact report is planned to be released later in 2018, with the final report certified by the PV Water board by the end of that year. The public will have more opportunities to weigh in as the process moves forward.
Construction is roughly estimated to be completed by 2025, according to Lockwood.
After pumping the water annually, farming the land can be a tricky, and risky, business. In a 2014 letter to then-PV Water General Manager Mary Bannister, Dick Peixoto, owner of Lakeside Organic Gardens, which farms the land, wrote that there were five farmers growing there in 1978, yet now he is the last one.
“The main reason is the exposure to flooding and losing part or all of your crops,” he wrote.
Peixoto cited an instance a number of years ago, when Lakeside Organic Gardens lost about $50,000 worth of butternut squash due to an unseasonably heavy amount of rain on a single day.
“This single incident drives us to wonder if we should be farming there at all … it is always a high-risk property,” he wrote, later expressing his support of a College Lake project.
The College Lake project is one of many outlined in the agency’s Basin Management Plan, which was updated in 2014. The plan includes projects and programs designed to bring the over-drafted basin into balance and stop the seawater intrusion that results from over-pumping.
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, signed into law in 2014, decrees that basins such as the Pajaro Valley must achieve a sustainable water supply by the year 2040, or risk state intervention that could include pumping restrictions.
The legislation also requires that basins throughout the state adopt a groundwater sustainability plan by Jan. 1, 2020. In 2015, PV Water became a groundwater sustainability agency for the coastal Pajaro Valley basin.
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The Notice of Preparation for the College Lake project’s environmental impact report is available at pvwater.org or at the Watsonville Public Library, Freedom Branch Library and the Monterey County Library Pajaro Branch.
The public is invited to two meetings on the proposed project on Tuesday at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the Watsonville Civic Plaza Community Room, 275 Main St., fourth floor. Written or emailed comments can be submitted through Jan. 5 at 5 p.m. at
ei*@pv*****.org
or to PV Water, 36 Brennan St., Watsonville, 95076.
For information, visit pvwater.org or contact Marcus Mendiola at 722-9292, extension 33 or
me******@pv*****.org
.
