Poseidon pushes AES affair
Dave Brooks
It’s as familiar as images get in Huntington Beach: A group gazes
over the side of the Huntington Beach Pier onto surfers below, the
moment immortalized on a sleek glossy flier that looks like so many
others that appear in Surf City mailboxes.
What’s unusual about this piece of literature is its author:
Poseidon Resources, the Stamford, Conn., industrial developer
planning its second push to build a desalination plant behind the AES
power plant near Pacific Coast Highway.
The flier is part of the key public relations component missing
from the developer’s December 2003 attempt, when the council halted
the project in its tracks by rejecting its environmental impact
report, Poseidon Resources Senior Vice President Billy Owens said.
Poseidon recently hired Irvine-based public relations firm M4
Strategies to campaign for approval of the new environmental report,
which could begin publicly circulating by the end of January. City
Planner Ricky Ramos said his department is reviewing the report and
will soon make it available for 45 days of public review.
That could mean a hearing by early spring and a new series of
politically charged council meetings.
Activist and labor organizer John Earl said he has begun
organizing a local task force against the project, and although he
wouldn’t comment on the specifics of his strategy, he said it
involved showing the council that a large number of people in
Huntington Beach oppose Poseidon.
Owens said Poseidon is planning a similar strategy to prove that
Huntington Beach residents want desalination, pointing to a poll of
401 Surf City residents he commissioned by Kelton Research in March
2004. The report said 80% of Huntington Beach residents support a
local desalination facility “to provide a sufficient water supply if
a future water shortage occurs.”
M4 executive Shannon Widor also said the company has begun
distributing postcards and letters of support for the project and
plans “to provide residents with information about when public
meetings on the project are to be held,” he said.
Poseidon didn’t use this strategy in the past because of
instructions it received from former City Manager Ray Silver, Owens
said.
“We were told to work quietly and easily with the city and not
push what the city got out of it,” he said. “If it appeared to be a
foregone conclusion, it would be attacked.”
Since the summer of 2000, Poseidon has expressed interest in
building a desalination facility at the back of the AES power plant.
The $250-million project would use at least 100 million gallons of
water per day after it has passed through the AES cooling system,
separating salt and water molecules through a highly pressurized
membrane filtration system called reverse osmosis.
Owens estimates that 100 million gallons of seawater, when broken
down through this process, would result in 50 million gallons of
potable water and 50 million gallons of sea salt, which would then be
returned to the ocean through the AES outfall pipe along with
additional cooling water from the power plant that wasn’t used by
Poseidon.
Local environmentalists are concerned that the high-density salt
discharge would be harmful to marine life, but Owens said he plans to
present research that indicates the salt will dissipate to normal
levels within a maximum 150-foot radius after discharge.
“The key to our success this time is showing residents that this
is good for Huntington Beach,” said Owens, who added the project will
create 18 full-times jobs, as well as $1.8 million in annual property
taxes.
If the facility is eventually sold to a public agency, which under
law wouldn’t have to pay property taxes, he said he would require a
clause to the purchase requiring the agency to pay $1.8 million
annually through an in-lieu fee.
Not everyone is convinced. Councilwoman Debbie Cook, a member of
the state Water Desalination Task Force, said she hasn’t written off
desalination technology but doesn’t like Poseidon’s involvement in
the project.
“It’s the privatization of water,” she said. “And Poseidon is the
middle man in all of this. They are simply adding cost.”
She said she would rather see the Municipal Water District of
Orange County pursuing a project, but Poseidon has a long-term lease
on the AES site, one of the only feasible locations in the county
because of the presence of the company’s intake and outfall pipes.
Although there is no formal deal to sell desalinated water to the
district, Owens said he is confident the district would buy the water
and maybe even resell some of it to the Huntington Beach Water
Department.
“[The Municipal Water District] is talking to us quietly, but not
officially,” he said.
* DAVE BROOKS covers City Hall. He can be reached at (714)
966-4609 or by e-mail at dave.brooks@latimes.com.
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