Cambria will serve water to customer despite drought concerns. ‘We have no choice’
During its meeting Thursday afternoon, the Cambria Community Services District’s Board of Directors told staff it could issue a will-serve water letter to a property owner who wishes to build a home in the Cambria Pines Estates neighborhood.
But not all were comfortable with the decision.
“I, too, am extremely concerned about our water supply; I’m extremely concerned about our environment,” Karen Dean, vice president of the unincorporated coastal community’s board, said during the meeting. “I feel like we have no choice, that we have to approve this.”
Dean’s discomfort was generally echoed among other members of the five-person governing board, who noted that the CSD is under a tight contractual obligation to issue will-serve letters to customers who had water meters installed on their properties before a new-water-connection moratorium went into place in November 2001.
The property in question on Thursday afternoon had its water meter installed in April 2001, and the owners have been paying bi-monthly service fees since then. The owners, represented by Christine Lingenfetter, now wish to build a 4,000-square-foot home with a 1,000-square-foot garage and 600-square-foot guest house.
By issuing the will-serve letter, the property owner now only needs to receive building permits from the San Luis Obispo County Planning and Building Department before they can build their home.
It’s likely, however, that the California Coastal Commission will challenge any building permits for the home — as it is set to do for two other proposed homes in the same Cambria Pines Estates neighborhood in a hearing Friday.
The Coastal Commission’s decision on Friday may set a precedent for all new homes proposed to be built in Cambria, regardless of whether they have an existing water connection or will-serve letter from the CSD.
The chief concern is water — or really, the lack of.
Cambria pumps its drinking water from wells beneath the Santa Rosa and San Simeon creeks. It’s long been established that Cambria has a limited water supply deemed unsustainable for a growing population, or possibly even its current population.
When a dry year comes along — as the community is currently experiencing — the creeks tend to shrivel up.
The CSD is required under its permits to operate its water wells to ensure the health of the riparian habitat that relies on the creeks.
Because the community currently has no other source of drinking water, the CSD is left during drought periods to declare water shortage emergencies and ask residents to cut back on their water usage.
The most recent declaration came this past July, when the CSD declared a stage four water shortage emergency and found “that the demands and requirements of water consumers cannot be satisfied without depleting the water supply of the CCSD to the extent that there would be insufficient water for human consumption, sanitation and fire protection.”
But when faced with an application for a will-serve letter for a property with a “grandfathered” water meter — one installed on the property before the moratorium — board members found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“The district has a contractual obligation to approve this request,” CSD legal counsel Timothy Carmel said during Thursday’s meeting. “If the district does not honor its obligation, it will be sued for breach of contract.”
“When the district loses that lawsuit, which it almost certainly will,” Carmel continued, “it would then have to pay interim damages for the time the property owners were prevented from developing, would be compelled by the court to provide them with water service anyway and would have to pay attorneys fees and costs.”
Those statements deterred much resistance from the board members in granting the will-serve letter Thursday.
Board member Harry Farmer made a motion during the meeting to delay the board’s vote on the will-serve letter until a later date, but his motion failed. He then abstained from the vote granting the will-serve letter. All other board members voted in favor of the letter.
“It would be the height of irresponsibility to subject this board to what would clearly be a lawsuit that we would very clearly lose,” board President Donn Howell said during the meeting. “I realize that maybe we don’t have water. We don’t even know if it’s going to rain again — we don’t know if it’s ever going to rain again. So we’re in the midst of uncertainty, we have to do what we are legally obligated to do.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 10:00 AM.
