Agriculture is dying here in North County. The rapid decline of local farming production is not primarily due to drought, wildfires, or lack of demand, but instead is the result of the prohibitive cost of water farmers are forced to purchase from the San Diego County Water Authority.
In an effort to provide desperately needed relief to farmers and residents, the Fallbrook Public Utility District and our neighboring Rainbow Municipal Water District have petitioned LAFCO, the San Diego Local Agency Formation Commission, to switch suppliers from the Water Authority to the considerably less expensive Eastern Municipal Water District, located just north of us, in a process called detachment. After three long years, LAFCO is expected to make a final determination on our communities fate this Monday.
The Water Authority has aggressively protested our two districts’ long-standing legal right to detach, claiming that our small rural communities with a combined 56,000 residents buying water elsewhere would irreparably harm the other 3.3 million residents of the county. Yes, the Water Authority with an annual budget of just under $1 billion is actually making the argument that they have no ability to accommodate a tiny fraction of their users leaving.
Even more ironic, the Water Authority’s primary ally in this fight is the city of San Diego, which is also looking to buy significantly less water from from the authority in the future for nearly 1.4 million residents.
Representatives of the San Diego Mayor’s office and its political allies have cynically testified before LAFCO that, five years after our small water districts detach, we will unfairly impact their residents with a potential 1% rate increase. This is hypocrisy because LAFCO has calculated San Diego will impact all other residents in the Water Authority service area by nearly five times as much when the Pure Water recycling project is completed.
Apparently San Diego thinks this impact is fine when they are burdening others, but any slight rate increase for their residents is unthinkable.
Meanwhile, the average Fallbrook ratepayer currently pays an estimated $38 more per month than those in San Diego. Fallbrook is a majority Hispanic community with one of the highest poverty rates in the County — roughly 70% of Fallbrook students qualify for free school lunches. Even if detachment is successful, our ratepayers on average will still be paying more than San Diego ratepayers due to our topography and resulting infrastructure costs.
The truth is that San Diego has the lion’s share of voting power at the Water Authority (just like at SANDAG) and is partially responsible for the agency’s costly overinvestment in water infrastructure, including the Carlsbad desalination plant boondoggle and the Emergency Water Storage Project, all for the sake of water reliability, despite a whopping 40% drop in county-wide demand since 2010.
These questionable investments are primarily responsible for water costs tripling over the last decade, placing our region’s rates among the highest in the nation. Fallbrook customers have been paying for these projects for years despite having zero access to these costly new water supplies.
Meanwhile, the San Diego, which accesses both desalinated and stored water, is seeking to “roll off” from the Water Authority when recycled supplies from the Pure Water project begin. Within ten years, San Diego will be reducing its purchases from the Water Authority by nearly half, driving costs up for the remaining users.
In support of our legal right to purchase water from another supplier, the LAFCO staff has proposed our communities pay the Water Authority an “exit fee” of $24 million over 5 years, which would make the authority whole and give the agency time to make adjustments. As for the potential consequences of San Diego’s “roll off” and its enormous impact on other member agencies, no exit fee has been proposed.
That’s right — the agency making the loudest objections to our leaving will pay zero for its own costly impacts on the rest of the county, and is counting on ratepayers in Fallbrook and Rainbow to help foot the bill. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Current San Diego leadership would rather let our farmers and agricultural lands wither on the vine in return for our communities’ further subsidization of the costly investments by San Diego and the Water Authority.
Fortunately, the ultimate decision on our water future isn’t in the hands of the Water Authority or San Diego politicians and their allies, but instead rests with the LAFCO board, whose members are entrusted with the responsibility to preserve agricultural lands. We can only hope that these board members will be able to see through the spurious claims and political powerplays to come up with a truly fair and equitable decision on Monday.
Lila Hargrove is chief executive officers of the Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce.