Nipomo’s new water pipeline, laid at the of cost $17.5 million, is expected to bring in 650 acre-feet of water per year by July of 2016. In a decade, the hope is that the pipe will transport four times that amount.
That’s small comfort to Pismo Beach, Grover Beach, and Arroyo Grande, who, as part of the Northern Cities Management Area (NCMA), are seeking a court order to limit groundwater pumping and further development on the Nipomo Mesa. They’re concerned that Nipomo’s sucking up too much groundwater, which will eventually cause saltwater to intrude on their end of the aquifer.
NCMA filed a petition Sept. 28 to enforce a previous order calling for Nipomo to build a pipeline and buy water from Santa Maria.
It’s a battle that’s been going on since 2005, when a Santa Clara Superior Court judge stipulated that the section of the sprawling Santa Maria Groundwater Basin, which reaches from Nipomo up into the Five Cities, be divided into the NCMA, which covers Grover Beach, Oceano, Pismo Beach, and Arroyo Grande; and Nipomo Mesa Management Area (NMMA), which encompasses four water providers on the Nipomo Mesa.
A judgment followed calling on Nipomo to build a pipeline to buy 2,500 acre-feet a year from Santa Maria. That’s the order NCMA wants to enforce.
When it was originally handed down from the judge, Nipomo tried to finance the pipe with the formation of an assessment district, but residents turned up their noses at the idea, which led the district to split the project into phases and look for money elsewhere. A ribbon cutting in July of this year celebrated the completion of the first stage of the project. Construction is expected to be finished in 2022, with that 2,500 acre-feet coming through by 2025.
That’s too slow for the NCMA, prompting the petition to enforce the project’s completion. They say that Nipomo’s groundwater pumping is still growing—by about 5,000 acre-feet in the last decade—and that the pumping has created a depression. About 1,300 acre-feet of groundwater that once flowed toward the NCMA now flows toward the depression, which is under Nipomo.
“The groundwater tilt towards the depression poses the immediate risk of irreparable harm to the NCMA parties by increasing the likelihood of imminent seawater intrusion,” the petition reads. “If that intrusion occurs, it’s likely to render much of the local aquifer within NCMA unusable.”
They claim that Nipomo should have completed the pipe in 2012, not 2015; that they have no funding, schedule, or “reasonable prospect” to finish the pipe and comply with the 2008 court order; and that the County has made things worse by approving developments in Nipomo where there is no water for growth.
Nipomo Community Services District Michael LeBrun told the Sun he would be briefed by counsel on the matter in the coming weeks.
“You might ask how many acre-feet of new water they have collectively developed in the past 20 years (I think the answer is zero),” he wrote in an email. “FYI, by contract, NCSD will be delivering nearly 1 billion gallons (3,000 acre-feet) of new water annually across its recently completed $17.5 million pipeline within 10 years.”
The case is scheduled to go before a judge in February of 2016.
This article appears in Oct 15-22, 2015.