SLO County CSD reaches agreement with school district over disputed well rights
Two North Coast districts have settled an acrimonious, months-long battle over the future value of access to a water well that belongs to one of the districts, but that is located on the other district’s property.
Thursday, the Cambria Community Services District board unanimously approved a settlement agreement with the Coast Unified School District about the disputed well the former drilled in 2000 on the Coast Union High School property on Santa Rosa Creek Road.
The settlement allows the CSD to make a one-time payment of $260,000 for continued access to that well in perpetuity, serving its ratepayers, as it has for decades under lease agreements that the services district’s general manager estimates has cost the agency more than three-quarters of a million dollars.
The school board approved the settlement agreement June 27, the terms of which had been hammered out in a series of mediations that began in April.
Under the settlement agreement, the CSD also will construct a new access route to the well and reimburse the school district $5,000 for its appraisal of the property.
The high school irrigates its fields from a well near the one the CSD has labeled SR4, however the school district gets its potable water from the CSD.
The districts’ mediations capped months of acrimony, with varying proposals for leases, purchase or a combination, lawsuit threats and the possibility that the CSD could file for eminent domain over the well’s location. Other propositions had been for escalating lease payments starting at $80,000 a year.
All in all, the often contentious negotiations about the issue stretched out “for the better part of a year,” CSD General Manager Matt McElhenie said Thursday as he introduced the settlement agenda item.
The CSD also will pay to develop the new, shorter access road to the well, which will provide an alternate route for the services district. It had been using an existing, serpentine route that winds through the campus, the increased use of which posed a possible safety issue, especially for students when school is in session.
Jim Green, utilities department manager, told the Board initial estimates for that new route have been approximately $40,000 for the road and up to $60,000 for a fence around it.
In 2000, the services district began taking water from the well to supplement the community’s supply, replacing water that had been provided by an inadequate CSD well, closer to town and near Santa Rosa Creek. The well was being threatened by a plume of MTBE, making the water from the well unusable.
Since that time, the CSD’s use of its well on the school district’s property “has become a critical part of the CCSD’s source of water for the community,” according to McElhenie’s report to the board in September.
CCSD draws the majority of its water from a narrow aquifer on San Simeon Creek Road, but says that in dry seasons and droughts, that source can be inadequate to supply the entire community and provide a buffer for fires.
The SR4 well is in the Santa Rosa Creek aquifer, too, but is higher up the creek than the CSD’s other wells there.
