Poseidon is not right for Huntington

John F. Scott

A beach report last week stated that beaches in Huntington Beach at

Brookhurst Street and at Newland Street were closed for 500 feet up

coast and 500 feet down coast. In light of this ongoing problem, the

decision by the Planning Commission to certify the Poseidon

environmental report is disappointing and incomprehensible.

Huntington Beach has a pollution problem on local beaches that has

defied the best efforts of scientists to correct the problem. Despite

this, the company breezed into the city with an army of paid

scientists and local lobbyists and convinced the Planning Commission

to certify an environmental report that allows Poseidon to dump 50

million gallons of their desalinization waste each day into those

very same waters.

That decision is even more mystifying since the Huntington Beach

Redevelopment Agency, in its effort to capitalize on beach assets,

provided hotels with $67 million of public funds as incentives for

developing in Huntington Beach. Those hotels are just up coast from

the planned ocean dump.

Huntington Beach will not get any of Poseidon’s water. Huntington

Beach will get the ocean and air pollution resulting from the

desalinization of 50 million gallons of potable water each day. Only

$800,000 of tax revenue for the Redevelopment Agency is the benefit

for Huntington Beach. Santa Margarita residents will get the water

without environmental costs, but their water bills will reflect the

Huntington Beach tax. If Poseidon sells this plant to a public

entity, as they did in Tampa Bay, Huntington Beach will be left with

only the pollution.

The California Water Desalinization Task Force is charged with

determining the impact of placing about two dozen desalinization

plants up and down the coast. They are in the process of providing

direction on siting issues, feed water intake, concentrate

management, desalinization technology, energy issues and economic

issues.

The California Coastal Commission has raised many very serious

questions about desalinization. The most basic one is whether

seawater, which is a public trust resource held in common for public

use, should be changed to a commodity for private consumption and

sale.

Finally, the California Energy Commission just released a 400 page

document that studies the effects of AES’s ingesting of up to

500-million gallons of seawater each day and returning it to the

ocean in a significantly warmer condition. It is incomprehensible

that the Planning Commission made a decision of such import for the

residents of Huntington Beach without the benefit of state wide

planning or without addressing some of the basic questions raised by

these documents.

* JOHN F.SCOTT is a Huntington Beach resident. To contribute to

“Sounding Off” e-mail us at hbindy@latimes.com or fax us at (714)

965-7174.