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Coastal Commission bans new dwelling units in Los Osos, Cambria

February 16, 2022

By JOSH FRIEDMAN

The California Coastal Commission voted on Friday to ban new accessory dwelling units in Cambria and Los Osos, citing water supply concerns.

San Luis Obispo County officials had proposed relaxed regulations for secondary welling units in order to create more opportunities for people in need of housing. However, Coastal Commission staff pushed back against the county’s plan, arguing more accessory dwelling units would negatively impact the water supply and other resources in Los Osos and Cambria.

“In particular, the lack of a water supply in Cambria and Los Osos is well known to the commission and the county,” Coastal Commission staff stated in a report prior to Friday’s meeting.

Opponents of the commission’s ban argued the two coastal communities have a sufficient water supply to accommodate new secondary dwelling units.


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For whatever they’re worth, I just found some statistics on the site of the Public Policy Institute of California:


In 1900, the population of California was 2 million

In 1950, the population was 10 million

By 2000, the population was 37 million.

As of July, 2021, it is 39 million

1 in 8 residents of the United States lives in California.


I suspect that California does not have, and never did have, at least 1/8 of the drinkable water supply in the United States. That’s a really big problem that nobody seems to have done much planning or preparation for.


So now, we have highly-suspicious goings-on like the crazy, law-breaking Morro Bay WRF project which, as I discuss in my earlier post, may actually be a clandestine scheme to build a desal plant. If those suspicions are correct, it would be a facility financed, with federal loan and local tax money fraudulently obtained by claiming a different project purpose and by breaking numerous local, state and federal laws..


Desal might be a good idea, but if they want to build desal plants, they need to build them openly and honestly.


8

Thank you Coastal Commission!


-4

This is a very interesting development and I think it gives some credence to a theory I have recently heard. I really want to know what other CCN readers think about this.


To some, this might seem like quite a stretch, but a friend of mine believes that the outrageously-oversized Morro Bay WRF project (with infrastructure capable of handling many, many times the volume of Morro Bay’s sewage), is in fact a clandestine plan to build a regional desal plant, which would be intended to address area water shortages in Los Osos, Cambria, and other local communities..


Does that sound crazy? It does seem to fit the current situation, and the halting of these new dwelling units in Los Osos and Cambria could be used as one reason/excuse to morph the WRF into a desal facility.


My friend’s theory is that the crooks plan to eventually admit that the use of the new WRF plant to process sewage is a really dumb idea, because the project is so heavily flawed – at least for a sewage treatment plant. So here is the theory regarding the secret scheme: Why waste all the money already spent? Why not use the infrastructure for regional desal? … That, of course, having been the crooks’ plan all along.


Here are just some of the arguments for that point of view – focusing on just how dumb and how illegal the WRF project is:

1. Morro Bay needs a 1 million gallon per day sewer plant. The WRF is designed with infrastructure capable of processing over 16 million gallons per day input.

2. The WRF site is on seriously-unstable ground, in a place where a sewage spill would be catastrophic to the Estuary.

3. The plant does NOT remove the wastewater infrastructure from the area subject to coastal flooding because the big pump intended to bring all the sewage uphill to the WRF is on the property where the current WWTP is located

3. Pumping sewage 3 miles uphill in earthquake country is just plain dumb. When the line breaks, then what?

4. It has been admitted by a city employee that the alleged plan to recycle sewage by injecting the treated water into the ground for recapture by the wells isn’t going to be workable in the foreseeable future (some of us realized early on that it would NEVER work). So, the “water recycling facility cannot recycle water”.

5. Public agencies responsible for protecting the environment, as well as local government agencies, have broken countless local, state and federal laws during the course of the WRF project. They REALLY want that infrastructure and don’t care how many laws they have to break in order to get it.

6. False and misleading statements were used to obtain government loans. This is well-documented fact, but nobody seems interested in doing anything about it.


The WRF project has been financed by coercing and tricking Morro Bay middle- and fixed-income residents and business owners into paying for it. That has a couple of purposes, according to my friend.

1. The costs will drive out residents who don’t have a lot of money and can’t afford the it, paving the way for gentrification.

2. This is the “biggie”. The costs will drive the city of Morro Bay into bankruptcy so the facility can be converted to desal and owned by a private multinational corporation that can claim exemption from our local and state environmental and planning laws – and make a ton of money supplying water to the water-starved Central Coast.


As noted by Noam Chomsky, the playbook for privatization of public funds includes the following: “… make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”


9

Okay…let me get this straight…an unelected group of people can just wipe out someone’s total value to their undeveloped property?….have any of them been to Los Osos to see the area they are ruling over?….Have any of them met with the people they are stealing from in person?….


If the people you voted for had any guts… they wouldn’t need their unelected goon squad to do their dirty work….


14

Judging from the lengthy conditions put on development approvals, and red taging illegal construction, development is conditional not a ‘right’.

People on both sides of the political spectrum claim ‘rights’ that they simply don’t have.

For better or worse, the Coastal Act was voted upon and setup the regulatory board, so voter passed.


-5

Must have their priorities, grape vines, people…


11

If grape prices are high enough, in bilateral cordon vineyards Regulated Deficit Irrigation may be worth considering. Basically a double set of submains, lateral and drip lines are installed at the time of planting, yes, $$$. During one irrigation scheduling, the drippers on one side of the cordon are watering. On the next scheduling, the drippers on the other side of the cordon are watering. The concept is that water will be retained in the vine longer as water is translocated in the plant. The irrigation scheduling will be able to be extended. Yields are reportedly the same and water use is substantially reduced or so says the Aussie irrigation sales brochure.


-6

Grapes are a huge waste of water. Worked in the industry for 20yrs taking care of a small 10 acre vineyard. They were actually somewhat water conscious(8gallons per plant/week) but still watered with over 10 million gallons of water a season for about 3500 gallons of wine. That works out to about 3000 gallons of water for every gallon of wine produced about 750 gallons per bottle or 150 gallons per glass of wine. Others who grow for weight turn their water on in the spring and don’t turn it off until after harvest. Watering 24gallons per plant per day 7 days a week. Enjoy your glass of wine!


4

These decisions shouldn’t even be under the purview of the Coastal Commission!!!


30

“Opponents of the commission’s ban argued the two coastal communities have a sufficient water supply to accommodate new secondary units”. I’m sure that’s exactly what they did. But SERIOUSLY???


It is extraordinarily hard to imagine where they got that information, or the gall to actually make such statements in a public forum. This last summer many of us were on such short supply for water we were recycling shower water to flush toilets. This is a practice we have become far too familiar with. I love Cambria, but the CCSD issues far too many permits for the water currently available and they have a “wait list” that I don’t recall ever saying OK to either.


This is the kind of situation that ends up requiring a bunch of regulations that an industry ruled by common sense and something other than greed and lack of environmental concern would not need.


If we had gone with restoring the BEAVERS to our watershed, we might have created a more adequate supply than we now have, without environmental harm and with great environmental benefit. I wonder now, will that obvious solution ever catch on, given that those looking to profit from exploitation prefer to suggest wildly expensive desal/toilet-to-tap projects or (see above) ignore the problem as if it didn’t exist.


17

Finally after years of crying “we don’t have enough water, conserve water” etc etc etc but still approving any and all developments do to a perceived “massive housing shortage” (check out all of the residential developers going hog wild in SLO), some rationality FINALLY seeps through! But I won’t be surprised when Costal Commission can’t take the pressure and caves to the demands of developers and those who will profit from those developments. Let’s simply watch and wait but don’t hold your breath.

In case you haven’t figured it out, politicians create problems and then demand you pay to (attempt) to correct the problems they’ve created. Think about it.


40

STOP new construction in water short districts, cities and basins. We need sound 3RD PARTY AUDITED concrete plans to increase water supplies though conservation or other means. Climate change is here. We need to prepare our infrastructure. The western North America continental record setting twenty-two year drought demonstrates climate change won’t/can’t be prevented. I warned you folks on Covid-19 starting on March 14, 2020 in the first article appearing on CCN. Climate change is another obvious pending event.


-32

You could never conserve enough water to meet the water supply demands. The “other means” are building more reservoirs. When it does rain in this state, there are large watersheds that produce tremendous runoff that isn’t captured and often runs back into the ocean. Use our natural land formations and build more reservoirs within or around them to bank water.


I also read the story about the twenty-two-year drought. They also stated it was 800 years ago since it was this dry. So that means the climate has acted this way previously. So much for the theory man is the main cause of it. What caused it 800 years ago? Dinosaur’s and their flatulence? It’s obvious there are cycles in the climate. Follow the science. It proves it.


36

The man made nature of the cause is obvious, but if you don’t accept ‘science’ … again … it really does not matter. Climate change is here and we need to take the steps necessary to improve and strengthen our infrastructure including conservation, recharge basins, reservoir water storage, water consuming development moratoriums, any means necessary.


-15