Opinion: SAWPA Marks Half-Century of Regional Water Stewardship

The Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority, or SAWPA, is a joint powers authority consisting of Eastern Municipal Water District, Inland Empire Utilities Agency, Orange County Water District, San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District, and Western Municipal Water District. It was formed in 1975 with the stated mission to "develop and maintain regional plans, programs, and projects that will protect the Santa Ana River basin water resources to maximize beneficial uses within the watershed in an economically and environmentally responsible manner."

SAWPA member agencies collectively represent all the parties that were involved in a 1969 Superior Court decision that established water rights in the Santa Ana River watershed and established minimum flows in the river from Prado Dam into Orange County. The SAWPA Commission is composed of one board member from each of the five member agencies. SAWPA also has a variety of committees and subgroups that are made up of board members and staff of the member agencies.

SAWPA owns and operates the Inland Empire Brine Line, which collects a variety of saline discharges from industry and utilities in the Inland Empire and delivers it by pipeline to Orange County Sanitation District, where it is treated to remove contaminants and then discharged to the Pacific Ocean. The saline discharges come from a variety of processes that concentrate solids, particularly salts, in water. This water is too salty to be discharged into the Santa Ana River or to allow to percolate into our local groundwater basins. The treated brine that is discharged to the ocean is less salty than ocean water. Examples of the types of processes that generate this discharge include desalters that use reverse osmosis to remove salts from brackish groundwater and cooling towers at power plants and some industries.

SAWPA was the original builder of the Arlington Desalter, which is now operated by Western Water, and the first phase of the Chino Desalters, which are operated by a joint powers authority of water agencies in the Chino Basin to our west. The desalters were originally designed only to clean up water that was flowing underground into the Santa Ana River and creating problems for Orange County water utilities and their customers. Our local water utilities soon realized it was more beneficial to use the clean water produced by the desalters as a dependable local potable water supply and took over responsibility for operation and maintenance of the desalters.

SAWPA is frequently selected by the State of California to administer grant funds for water quality, environmental protection, water resource resiliency, and to support water service in disadvantaged communities. Two examples are a recent study of the impact of homeless encampments in the river bottom on water quality (minimal impact on water quality, but significant impact on debris and habitat destruction due to fires), and an ongoing project to eradicate a bamboo-like invasive plant species called Arundo donax that uses lots of water, crowds out important native plant species, restricts water flow and is a major fire hazard. SAWPA also recently concluded a demonstration project to determine whether cloud seeding could be a reliable source of additional precipitation in the watershed. The planned four-year study was terminated after one year when it became clear that our climate and geography are less than ideal for cloud seeding to be a reliable source of additional water for the region.

This 50-year milestone will be celebrated with a video and book which will be unveiled Jan. 22. The video will be posted on the SAWPA website, sawpa.gov/.