Commentary: Shovel-ready project is undergoing unnecessary delays

Almost two decades ago, in 1998, Poseidon Water proposed building a seawater desalination plant in Huntington Beach. After years of study and analysis, the city of Huntington Beach approved the project’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and various permits in 2006. An EIR approval might sound like the end of the road for the regulatory permitting process, but in California the process was just getting started.

A change in state regulations pertaining to the use of seawater for industrial purposes required Poseidon to pay for and the city to conduct a Subsequent Environmental Impact Report (SEIR) to analyze new information. This report was approved in 2010, more than six years ago. Since that time, the project has been approved by the State Lands Commission and the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board. Yet, more than a decade after first receiving its permits and environmental green light, the desalination project is still fighting through regulatory red tape.

This is all in the midst of a historic six-year drought that has devastated crops, caused businesses to flee the state and in 2015 resulted in the governor issuing mandatory water-rationing restrictions.

With aging water pipes and crumbling roadways, California is facing a serious infrastructure crisis. The California Policy Center conducted an extensive study of California’s infrastructure needs, which included an analysis of what financing models might be considered to help fund the extensive needs our state has. The study can be downloaded from our website at www.californiapolicycenter.org.

What we discovered is that private investors and pension funds have the capacity to finance state-of-the-art infrastructure like desalination. However, when the regulatory process takes decades instead of years, investors will start to look for other opportunities.

The Huntington Beach Seawater Desalination Project is a perfect example of regulatory restrictions run amok. In 2015, the state Water Resource Control Board approved new regulations for seawater desalination plants, once again moving the goal posts on a shovel-ready project that had successfully navigated every bureaucratic twist and turn.

The stated intent of the water board’s new desalination regulations is to provide the water industry with greater clarity and to streamline the permitting process. The Huntington Beach project will be a test case to see if state regulators are dealing honestly and allowing sound science to guide decisions, or will continue kicking the can down the road. It’s safe to say an entire state will be watching.

Regulatory restrictions have not always been this onerous. The planning process for the Hoover Dam took just more than a year and the construction took five years.

In 2008, after a decade of drought the country of Israel was on the verge of catastrophe. The Israeli government responded by commissioning water-recycling plants and five giant desalination plants — all larger than the proposed plant at Huntington Beach and all completed in less than a decade. Israel now has an abundance of water and can even export the precious commodity to neighboring nations.

We can learn from our ally in the Middle East. Reasonable regulatory restrictions would be embraced by most Californians. But as we enter the sixth year of a serious drought, there is nothing reasonable about a 19-year permitting process for a single seawater desalination project. It’s past time for our elected leaders to consider regulatory reform. We have the world’s largest reservoir directly to our west and we should not allow bureaucratic red tape to prevent us from tapping into it.

Tustin resident MARC JOFFE is the Director of Policy Research at the California Policy Center.