Central Coast residents dispute Cal Am water costs
Who should control the water supply on the Monterey peninsula?
Some Carmel residents say they want to do it instead of the utility company California American Water, or Cal Am.
Much of the company’s first meet and greet in Carmel today was about that debate.
Fifth Avenue in Carmel served as the dividing line in the long lasting debate of who should control water on the Monterey peninsula.
On one side , the utility company with more than 600,000 customers in California .
“There are a lot of issues in this community that need to be solved, and Cal Am, we believe we are the right company to get them done,” says Cal Am President Richard Svinland.
On the other side, people with Public Water Now, a non-profit looking to get Cal Am out.
“We don’t feel they’ve been a responsible manager of our watershed, and we have the highest water cost in the country,” says Melodie Chrislock with Public Water Now.
With one acre of land, Chrislock says her bills in the summer are five to seven hundred dollars a month, and she’s heard of even higher.
“There are people in pebble beach saying their bills are $4,000 to $8,000 a month for water. I don’t care how wealthy you are but no one wants to pay that for water.”
But Cal Am disputes that. Plus, Svinland says the rate hike happened for a reason.
“One of the issues we had was an under collection of revenue. You know, all water systems need revenue to run. We have to pay the payroll. We need to pay the chemicals. We need to pay to purchase water in certain systems they have that.”
And the public utilities commission ordered the company to collect that money in five years instead of the 20 it originally proposed. But Svinland says the increase is only temporary.
“To be fair, we’ve had to put in very steep rates in order to drive conservation off the Carmel river. Once we get the desalination plant built, we won’t have that same type of rate structure anymore.”
Chrislock and others who came out to protest Friday morning say they are not buying that.
“Cal am has shown negligence, we feel. In 22 years of over drafting the carmel river, and we still have no new water. We have promises of a desal (desalination) in the horizon, but that could face a lot of legal challenges,” says Chrislock.
Carmel residents want to put a feasibility study on the ballot in 2018 to see if the Monterey peninsula water management district can buy out Cal Am. But when we spoke with cal am’s president today, he said, the company isn’t for sale.
