Orange County Grand Jury • 2008-2009 • Agency Response
Response to: "Paper Water" - Does Orange County Have A Reliable Future? 06/19/09 4.13MB

Paper Water - Does Orange County Have a Reliable Future Report C. Dunek Dear Judge Kim Dunning: This letter is*

Published: September 11, 2009 3 pages
Ver PDF original

Findings and Recommendations 2 findings

F1
There is inadequate coordination between local land-use planning agencies and local water supply agencies, resulting in a process that fails to fully engage the issues. Response F-1. As it concerns the City of Lake Forest, we respectfully disagree with the Finding. City staff frequently coordinates with the three water suppliers that serve Lake Forest (Irvine Ranch Water District, El Toro Water District, and Trabuco Canyon Water District). As required by State law, the City provides these agencies with our adopted Housing Element to assist them with the planning process. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) process currently requires that new development projects evaluate the ability for public utilities, such as water, to be provided to the project. Water supply agencies play a critical role by preparing Water Supply Assessments (WSA) for defined types of projects. The City is required to include the WSA in the environmental document for a project.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
Each Orange County municipal planning agency, in cooperation with its respective water supply agency, should prepare for adoption by its city council, a dedicated Water Element to its General Plan in conjunction with a future update, not to exceed June 30, 2010. This document should include detailed implementation measures based on objective-based policies that match realistic projections of the County's future The Honorable Kim Dunning September 11, 2009 water supplies. These objectives, policies and implementation measures should address imported supply constraints, including catastrophic outages and incorporate the realistic availability and timing of "new" water sources such as desalination, contaminated groundwater reclamation and surface water recycling. Response 1. The City of Lake Forest will not be implementing this recommendation at this time. Water supply is a statewide and regional issue. State law already mandates seven elements, including a Conservation Element, which provides the opportunity to include appropriate policies regarding water supply and conservation. The City does not have the staff expertise to meaningfully evaluate complicated water supply issues and the availability of "new" water sources. Therefore, we rely on the expertise of the water supply agencies that serve the city to assess the adequacy of water supply and their ability to provide the resources to service community demand. Additionally, the City Council has already adopted an operating and capital budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year; the budget did not include adding a dedicated Water Element to the General Plan. Again, we thank you for bringing this important topic to the attention of local governments and water suppliers in Orange County. Should you have any questions or require additional information, please contact Benjamin Siegel, Assistant to the City Manager, at (949) 461-3537. Sincerely, CITY OF LAKE FOREST ark Tetterner Malvor Orange County Grand Jury c: Lake Forest City Council Robert C. Dunek, City Manager Robert L. Woodings, PE, Director of Public Works/City Engineer Gayle Ackerman, Director of Development Services General Manager, Irvine Ranch Water District General Manager, El Toro Water District General Manager, Trabuco Canyon Water District . . . .
F2
California's looming water supply crisis receives very little, if any, expressed concern from the public in comparison to the numerous other environmental issues presented during development project reviews. Response F-2. We can neither disagree nor agree with this Finding. CEQA charges planning agencies with presenting information on all potential impacts. It is true that more detailed discussion is often provided on issues such as traffic and noise, because these are the issues that are most often raised by the public in response to Notices of Preparation of Environmental Impact Reports. It would not be appropriate for the City to suggest that significant environmental impacts would occur when information from reliable sources (i.e. water districts) demonstrates that such impacts would not occur. The CEQA/EIR process for development projects does not place any more or less emphasis on any of the potential impacts that must be evaluated.
No recommendations for this finding

* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.