Mailbag: District’s mistakes hurt its credibility

Someone once spoke of three types of prevarications: lies, damnable lies and statistics.

I would like to correct several items that reflect South Coast Water District’s insidious, duplicitous invocation of all three (“Reclaimed water project reduced,” March 19):

The water district’s activities in this matter should lessen their ratepayers confidence in such a self-inflicted fiasco. If they truly believe that there was a “discrepancy” as voiced by their public relations employee Linda Homscheid then the fault and burden of proof rest with the applicant, not the state.

Once water district attorney and administrator Betty Burnett affixed her signature to the initial application for 89 acre feet per annum (afa), she tried to retroactively correct it by crossing out “89” and writing over it “890” afa but claims she forgot to correct the acreage total that this increased amount would irrigate.

This is quite humorous, considering she’s an attorney for a water district who signs under penalty of perjury that all information is true to the best of her recollection and/or knowledge. What else are these people getting wrong?

The instructions are very explicit: Applicants must provide specifics about location coordinates and placement, including any information that might be pertinent to the position of the actual stream flow removal.

In spite of repeated attempts by protesters to let the water district know that the Point of Diversion (POD) is inside a county wilderness park, not Laguna Beach, the water district refused to change several critical supporting documents, including their own Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) that said “Laguna Beach, CA.”

I sent and received an e-mail response back from Laguna Beach Community Development Director John Montgomery confirming it.

I forwarded it to the water district, but they never corrected themselves.

Homscheid fudged: The treatment facility is on SOCWA property, but the POD is inside a county park that is committed to protecting its communities’ (plural) natural resources.

Hello? Which part of stream bed don’t you get?

Same for the actually agreed upon amount requested that the water district claims was a misunderstanding: South Coast Water District screwed up; that’s their problem, not the state’s.

Ignorant commentators keep asserting that all of the drainage in Aliso Creek is “abandoned urban runoff.”

Call Cathy Nowak or any of the other Orange County Parks top planners and you’ll find that many (Clean Water Now! Coalition included) believe it to be more like 50% runoff and 50% natural drainage. I demanded that the water district use a new water separation test that determines actual percentages of runoff vs. natural, I learned about this from our own most excellent Senior Water Quality Analyst, Will Holoman.

South Coast Water District refused to perform this test, staying the course of unprovable, propagandistic “abandoned” notions.

Last, as for Homscheid’s statement claiming that no documentation of southern steelhead tout presence exists, I guess that water district General Manager Mike Dunbar and several of his long-term board members slept through the first six years of monthly Aliso Creek Watershed meetings where steelhead were discussed, then six years of quarterly meetings that featured steelhead comments.

Oh, and they must not have read the two main exhaustive, very precise studies we used as our Old and New Testaments: the 1997 U.S. Army Corps of Engineer Aliso Creek Watershed Study and the United States Environmental Protection Agency Water Quality Study for Aliso dated October 2000.

Both had innumerable mentions of the historical steelhead presence in Aliso, its migration terminating up around Leisure World (Moulton and Alicia parkways).

It was these two study resources that had significant United State Fish and Wildlife Service’s input, with their legitimacy and overwhelming evidence, that I relied upon heavily to persuade the National Marine Fisheries Service to declare Aliso a part of the “So Cal Distinct Population Segment” (DPS habitat) for steelhead in February 2009.

Adding to our frustration were repeated attempts by South Laguna Civic Assn.’s Michael Beanan and Jinger Wallace to convince NOAA that steelhead never ran there, and that they should rescind that DPS acknowledgment.

So much too for the association and Village Laguna claims that they are biologically sensitive, strident environmental protectionists.

They have stupidly chosen human needs over those optimal restoration conditions necessary to recolonize this native endangered species.

ROGER VON BÃœTOW