Santa Barbara looks to ocean desalination while Democrat legislature is in a coma

Robert Roebuck, project manager for Santa Barbara's public works department, at the water desalination plant in Santa Barbara, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Santa Barbara is preparing to restart a salt water desalination plant it constructed 20 years ago to address the city's water needs during an earlier severe drought. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

California Cities Take Action

• While the Democrat legislature obsesses about importing more illegal aliens we see local cities taking real action to create brand new water.

SANTA BARBARA -- A mothballed desalination plant sits like a time capsule near Santa Barbara's main tourist beach, a relic of California's last drought to end all droughts.

With its control room filled with dot-matrix printers, floppy disks and obsolete computers, the padlocked Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility represents this quintessential California coastal city's once-fleeting hope of quenching its thirst by tapping the ocean.

Now, 23 years after it closed, with the state entering the fourth year of its worst drought on record, Santa Barbara is preparing to reopen the plant, rekindling a debate that is spreading to communities up and down the coast: Is the state's water shortage now so dire that Californians should embrace desalination -- with its high economic costs and environmental risks -- as a critical element of a pricier water future?

The dilemma is the focus of the latest installment of this newspaper's ongoing series "A State of Drought."

"Desal is the last resort -- and we are at the last resort," said Bob Roebuck, Santa Barbara's project manager for the plan. "Our reservoirs are going dry. Our wells are dropping. This is it."

By early June, the Santa Barbara City Council is expected to vote to spend roughly $40 million to modernize and restart the desalination facility, located in an industrial area between Highway 101 and Santa Barbara's landmark Stearns Wharf.

The plant cost $34 million to build during California's last major drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But shortly after it opened in 1992, drenching rains returned. And because the water was so expensive to produce, the city shut down the plant three months later and sold its filters to Saudi Arabia. It has sat, closed, ever since.

A $1 billion plant in Carlsbad, north of San Diego, is set to open this fall. It will be the largest in North America and will supply 50 million gallons a day -- 7 percent of San Diego County's water supply.

The town of Cambria, 10 miles south of Hearst Castle on the San Luis Obispo County coast, began operating a small emergency $9.5 million desalination plant in November to keep it from running out of water. And officials in Monterey County this year drilled a 250-foot-deep test well at a remote beach in Marina as part of a plan to build a $320 million desalination plant to serve 100,000 residents of Monterey, Carmel and other surrounding towns by 2019.

The project still needs final approval from the state Coastal Commission and other agencies. It is proposed to replace water that state regulators ruled 20 years ago the Monterey Peninsula's water supplier, California American Water Co., has been taking from the Carmel River without proper rights.

Read more at the San Jose Mercury News

Vintage computers in the administration office at the water
desalination plant in Santa Barbara, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015.