ITEM: ACTION ITEMS
6. REVIEW ORDINANCE NO. 87 – AN URGENCY ORDINANCE OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA WATER MANAGEMENT DISTRICT ESTABLISHING A COMMUNITY BENEFIT ALLOCATION FOR THE PLANNED EXPANSION OF THE COMMUNITY HOSPITAL OF THE MONTEREY PENINSULA
Meeting Date: May 29, 2003 Budgeted: N/A
Program/Line Item No.: N/A
Staff Contact: Stephanie
Pintar Cost
Estimate: N/A
General Counsel Approval:
Counsel reviewed the staff report.
Committee Recommendation: The
Water Demand Committee reviewed this item at its May 16, 2003 meeting and made
no recommendation.
SUMMARY: On February 27, 1997, the Board considered
and approved an Urgency Ordinance that created a special community reserve
allocation for Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP). Both CHOMP and the City of Monterey requested
a special allocation of water to meet the demand of improvements to CHOMP’s
hospital facilities under the 1995 Amended Planned Community Plan Environmental
Impact Report (CHOMP Master Plan) approved by the City of Monterey on January
21, 1997 (relevant sections are shown at Exhibit 6-A). A copy of the District’s staff report, the
approved ordinance, other correspondence, and the February 27, 1997 meeting
minutes are shown at Exhibit 6-B.
Ordinance No. 87 was adopted as an urgency ordinance. Rule 11 of the District’s meeting rules (Exhibit 6-C) require the affirmative votes of five members of the Board for adoption of an urgency ordinance. In addition, Rule 22 requires the Board to review an urgency ordinance no later than one year from its effective date and to determine whether the ordinance should remain in effect without change, be amended, or be repealed. Rule 22 was suspended for the adoption of this ordinance, although the review provision was included in the text. District staff’s recent review of the provisions of Ordinance No. 87 brought to staff’s attention that the ordinance has not undergone the required review.
RECOMMENDATION: The Board should review the sections of Ordinance No. 87 listed under “Discussion,” consider each statement and make a decision (agree or disagree). If a majority of the Board disagrees with any provision of the existing ordinance, staff should be given direction to address the issue in an amending ordinance. The Board should provide staff with specific recommendations if an amending ordinance is to be developed.
If no changes are directed, the ordinance shall continue in effect with no sunset date.
DISCUSSION: Sections 1-4 of Ordinance No.
87 are listed below.
i.
The meaning of this language is that the water
savings associated with the walk-in refrigeration unit and cooling tower
retrofit programs are not available to offset expanded uses, but rather are to
be used to reduce the amount of water needed from the reserve established by
this ordinance and/or to reduce overall CHOMP water use. [AGREE / DISAGREE] This is a policy
question and the response will not trigger the need for a new ordinance.
Ordinance No. 84, Amending
Jurisdictional Allocations, allocated 16 acre-feet of water to CHOMP to “enable
a currently planned expansion project which will serve and benefit the entire
Monterey Peninsula region.” (Finding 6, Ordinance No. 84). Ordinance No. 84 made 150 acre-feet (AF) of
saved water from the CAWD/PBCSD wastewater reclamation project available for
use by member jurisdictions within the District. Ordinance No 84 was repealed in December 1996
after a lawsuit (Save Our Peninsula Committee & Ed Leeper vs. MPWMD)
was filed which alleged that Ordinance No. 84 was enacted in violation of CEQA.
On December 4, 1996, the
District received a letter from Mayor Dan Albert, City of Monterey, requesting
the District to allocate water to CHOMP from a special community reserve. A similar request was received from CHOMP’s
President/CEO Jay Hudson on December 12, 1996.
Copies of these letters are included in the staff report for the January
23, 1997 meeting shown at Exhibit 6-D. Mr. Hudson’s letter acknowledged the
potential repeal of Ordinance No. 84 and asked the Board to consider initiating
a separate process to allocate 16 acre-feet of water to CHOMP as a special
community reserve allocation.
The
Board considered the City’s and CHOMP’s request on January 23, 1997 (Exhibit
6-D). The Board directed staff
to prepare an urgency ordinance for consideration on February 27, 1997. The motion included direction to make the
ordinance an urgency ordinance and to process the ordinance as a categorical
exemption. Minutes for the January 23,
1997 meeting are attached as Exhibit 6-E. Ordinance No. 87, allocating 18.28 AF to meet
the water needs of CHOMP’s Amended Planned Community Plan, was adopted as an
urgency ordinance on February 27, 1997.
Water
demand calculations used to determine that 18.28 AF (Ordinance No. 87) was
sufficient for the project were included in the CHOMP Amended Planned Community
Plan EIR (Exhibit 6-A).
The EIR states the following in the section “Project Analysis”:
“The MPWMD applies a separate water demand factor for forecasting potential future water use. The MPWMD has a variety of water use factors which it applies to a variety of projects to determine potential future water use. As it pertains to the proposed project, the MPWMD factor of 0.0002 AF per gross square feet of new building area is the factor used by the MPWMD (Francesca Graziano, pers. Com., May 31, 1996).
The
proposed project will add 91,430 square feet of building area for hospital
clinical functions. The parking garage
building area of 179,000 square feet is not a water consuming building function
and is not included in the square footage used to calculated increased water
demand from the project. Annual
increased water demand based on 91,430 square feet of new hospital area using
the MPWMD water use factor of 0.0002 acre-feet per year (91,430 x .0002 =
18.286) (ibid.).”
As of May 22, 2003, the
District has issued a permit only for the first phase of the CHOMP Amended
Planned Community Plan EIR (CHOMP Master Plan) approved by the City of Monterey
in January 1997. A permit for the Cancer
Center (#16235) was issued on July 15, 1997 for 17,070 square-feet of medical
use (3.414 AF). The community benefit
allocation for CHOMP has 14.866 AF remaining.
Recent discussions with CHOMP
have centered on determining an appropriate water factor for the hospital’s
current expansion plans. Staff has also
recently (in May 2003) involved the Water Demand Committee in the review of
several alternatives to the commercial water use factor for Group II uses. Although the District indicated in 1996 that
the Group II commercial water use factor would be applied to gross
square-footage, the EIR consultant for the CHOMP Amended Plan Community Plan
EIR applied the factor only to new clinical area and did not calculate
or consider a water use for the support areas. If the Group II factor is applied to gross
square-footage (both clinical and support uses), the special community benefit
allocation for CHOMP would not meet the project’s water needs. Staff was not aware of this oversight or of
the differentiation of clinical space versus support space until meetings with
CHOMP in 2003. In fact, staff issued the
Cancer Center permit based on gross square-footage (e.g. both clinical and
support areas).
Voluntary Conservation
CHOMP has voluntarily undertaken a number of on-site conservation retrofits since 1996. In 1996, CHOMP retrofit its Koi pond by installing a pumping and filtration system. Previous to the pumping and filtration system, the Koi pond fountain had been replacing overflow with fresh water. CHOMP also installed a timer on the cooling tray used for radiation shielding blocks in the oncology unit in 1995, reducing water waste caused when an employee failed to manually turn off the cooling system.
CHOMP has several other water conservation retrofits in the planning or implementation stages. These include a walk-in cooler retrofit that replaced a flow-through design with a chilled water circulating loop, installation of new sterilizing equipment, and a cooling tower retrofit. The refrigeration retrofit and the sterilizer retrofits have been completed. Staff is in the process of reviewing the meter readings and other information, but staff may not have the expertise to quantify the savings. CHOMP has been very cooperative in providing information to staff.
Mandatory Conservation
As a condition of a water permit issued in 1994 (#14483), CHOMP was required to retrofit its toilets, showers and faucets to meet the District’s conservation requirements. Retrofitting took place between 1996 and June 2001, but has not been completely verified by District staff. In 1995 when the retrofit requirement was triggered, the majority of CHOMP’s toilets and showerheads pre-dated low-flow toilet requirements (3.5 gallons-per-flush) and low-flow showerhead requirements (2.5 gallons-per-minute) introduced in the late 1970’s. As a result, staff estimates that retrofitting the hospital’s toilets alone should have resulted in savings of at least 16.5 acre-feet.
Staff has reviewed CHOMP’s water use records for the period of 1992 through 2003 (graph attached as Exhibit 6-F. It appears that either the retrofitting undertaken by CHOMP, both voluntarily and as required by the District, has not resulted in the expected water savings, or there have been other increases in use.
Former California Department of Forestry Fire Station
Credit
The District documented a Water Use Credit for the former CDF fire station in 1995. The fire station was located off of Highway 68 and the credit was documented in a letter to Frank Vitale, Projects Consultant for Community Hospital Foundation, on April 21, 1995. Credit for the fire station was based on the Water Rationing Base Year Use on the water meter serving the facility. At the time, the account was under the name of Division of Forestry. Staff understood that following documentation of the credit and demolition of the facility, all water use at the site would cease and the meter would be removed.
District staff is now aware that the water meter that formerly served the Division of Forestry has been maintained by CHOMP. On January 5, 1996, the name on the account was transferred from Division of Forestry to Community Hospital (Joe DiMaggio, California-American Water Company, tel. conf.). Water use from the meter was sporadic through 1997, becoming regular in 1998. Staff questioned the use of the meter while preparing the comments on the new Forest Pavilion Wing Draft EIR in April 2003, and will be following up with CHOMP in the near future. CHOMP’s three meters (including the former Division of Forestry meter) were combined into one account in March 2000 (Joe DiMaggio, California-American Water Company, tel. conf.). As the water use on the former Division of Forestry site was not discontinued when the fire station was demolished, there is a question about the validity of the water credit assigned for the fire station.
Forest Pavilion Wing Project
In March 2003, EMC Planning Group Inc. completed the Draft EIR on the Forest Pavilion Wing Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula for the City of Monterey. The proposed project is a new three-story addition to the northeast section of the existing hospital. The structure will provide 97,738 square feet of clinical and support space and 120 patient beds. However, as the project involves renovation and remodeling of existing hospital rooms, the project will result in a net increase of 48 patient beds. A copy of the Water Resources section of the 2001 Amended Planned Community Plan is attached as Exhibit 6-G and a memorandum dated November 8, 2001 from Frank Vitale, Projects Consultant for Community Hospital Foundation, regarding CHOMP Construction Plans and Changes to Water Demand is attached as Exhibit 6-H.
On April 21, 2003, the District sent a response to the City of Monterey regarding the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Forest Pavilion Wing at Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP). The Forest Pavilion Wing is a new project that was not part of the CHOMP Master Plan approved by the City of Monterey in 1997. A copy of the District’s response is attached as Exhibit 6-I.
The newly raised issues discussed here, including the question of how the District should calculate new water demand (gross square footage versus clinical or some other method), must be addressed in the near future. At this point it is unclear how the Forest Pavilion might increase the water demand from the originally anticipated 18.28 AF contemplated in Ordinance No. 87. Although Ordinance No. 87 did not address the issues raised by the recent Forest Pavilion project, Ordinance No. 87 and the Forest Pavilion project are intertwined. Staff requires direction on processing permits for both of these projects and for addressing the other issues raised in this discussion.
IMPACT ON RESOURCES: Should the Board make recommendations that
require an amending ordinance, resources will be needed to conduct the
appropriate environmental review.
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