Tasks that need to be undertaken include a review of seawater purification, internet access to West Basin minutes, and a comprehensive security review.
Initiatives
Although the West Basin Municipal Water District is a generally a well-running operation, a few things need to be done to enhance its value to the community If I am elected, I will pursue these initiatives; if I am not elected, I certainly hope that my opponent will consider them.
- Visibility of the Board
Ethics abuses of the past, particularly abuses of director's expense accounts, have been uncovered by hard working journalists reviewing the board minutes. It is a legal requirement that the board meetings be accessible to the public; long ago it was recognized that secret dealings are not in the public inerest. However, the board minutes are massive documents and those investigators who have laboriously sifted through them to find corruption are to be commended for their hard work. [note: my opponent is NOT suspected of any corruption!]
I propose to make the information in the board minutes easier to access and investigate by posting the minutes on the West Basin web page in a format that can be copied and pasted into other commonly available computer programs such as spreadsheets and word processors (NOT Adobe .pdf format!). This will make it much easier to search, sort,and subtotal the information there, and will result in a more visible and less corrupt board of directors (40% of whom have been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in the last two years). I do not believe that posting of the minutes in the web page would be much work because the documents are already prepared on a computer, and posting them may be no more complex than a simple upload.
It is not right that a water agency wastes large amounts of paper to distribute the minutes when elecronic publishing would suffice for most users. A waste of paper is also a waste of the water required to manufacture the paper, a waste of forest resources that supply the raw material for the paper. Waste of water should be embarrassing to an agency that promotes water conservation!
- Seawater - too much too soon!
The West Basin Municipal Water District has established an experimental seawater desalination plant. The rationale for doing this is that our sources of imported water are decreasing and the sea is an infinite supply of raw material for producing fresh water. However, I am opposed to expansion of this project for the following reasons:
- The business of the district should be to obtain and deliver water, of a quality that meets all requirements of the California Department of Health Services and other regulators, at the lowest possible cost to the user and with minimum disruption to the community. The district should NOT be in the business of conducting science experiments or establishing demonstration projects for risky new technology.
- The technology of seawater desalination is rapidly developing. If we delay seawater purification we will get a future system that will be more efficient.
- The cost of desalination depends on the amount of salt to be removed. Dead sea water from Israel would be very costly to process. Fresh water would cost zero. We have an abundant supply of brackish water that is much less salty than seawater, and less costly to purify. Further, it comes from deep wells and does not have the biological contamination of sea water. I strongly suspect that application of existing desalination technology to this brackish water will, for now, be a better investment than desalination of sea water. Of course, the cost of delivery pipelines needs to be included in the financial analysis, as well as the increased gradient to the coastal barrier injection wells that will require a greater input.
- The water district has conducted a study of the energy consumed in delivering water to the consumer. The delivery of water over vast distances is one of the largest consumers of electric power in California. This study was published in the minutes of May 24. The findings of this study are that the desalination of sea water is more costly than recycled water, replenished groundwater, or imported water. For this reason, we should use sea water only after all other possibilities such as expanded use of the Hyperion effluent and brackish water are exhausted.
I would like to see the district's present marketing effort for recycled water continued. The more uses we can find for recycled water, the less we will need to import and the longer we can defer costly sea water desalination.
- Security Review
Since 1982 America has been under terrorist attack by various foreign and domestic enemies. Those attacks have reached our homeland, with the 1993 truck bombing of the New York World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City Federal Building (also a truck bomb), and the attack of September 11, 2001 which finally got our attention. The official government report on the 9-11 event cites a "failure of imagination" as a key enabler for enemy success. West Basin Municipal Water District needs to undertake a comprehensive security review to reduce the likelyhood of disaster and to implement plans to mitigate the damage if there is a disaster. This plan can be integrated into plans for natural disasters such as earthquake, fire, or flood (if we are lucky enough to have a flood!). Some aspects of this would include questions such as:
- Are we operating any "weapons of mass destruction" (such as tanks of chlorine) that might cause massive casualties if released?
- Do we practice good information security? Are our computer resources secure and backed up at a remote location?
- Have key employees received the appropriate background investigations?
- Could tempting economic targets (petroleum refineries) be shut down by interruption of their water supply?
- Are our communcations sytstems interoperable with those of first responders to a disaster?
- How might disaster recovery be financed?
Serious disaster planning needs to be done to make the district facilities less tempting as a target and to mitigate damage if there is an attack or natural disaster.
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