By lisagracekellogg@icloud.com | on September 02, 2022
Calleguas Municipal Water District Five candidate Steven Nash. (Courtesy photo)
Oxnard–Local resident Steven Nash has entered the Calleguas Municipal Water District race for District Five and wants to ensure that Oxnard is part of the conversation as Californians face challenging drought conditions.
Nash decided to run because Oxnard is the largest city in the county and deserves a seat at every table available. He feels the city hasn’t had homegrown representation on many boards, of which Calleguas is one.
“I want to make sure that District Five includes a sizeable portion of Camarillo, and our interests are aligned in many ways,” he said. “I think it’s important for Oxnard to have one of its residents occupying the District Five seat.”
With the things the City of Oxnard has done with its Advanced Water Purification Facility, he said it’d been left high and dry.
“One of my overriding concerns is finding new sources of water,” he said. “Calleguas is what is called a State Water Project dependent area. The Metropolitan Water District has not put forth the resources to give us the same water supply as the rest of the Metropolitan Water District, primarily Colorado River water and water from the Diamond River Reservoir, which is Colorado River water.”
Nash said it’s imperative they make sure their voices are heard and work collaboratively with Calleguas and the other water agencies in Ventura County.
“I’m talking about the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency and the United Water Conservation District,” he said. “We really need to find ways to come together and work together and make sure we have as resilient a water supply as possible. When it comes to a disruption in your water supply, there are not too many other things you can do.”
He feels that water is more important than electricity, at this point, for an area such as Ventura County.
“We don’t really have the surface water that we can access, and we don’t have the ocean desalinization plants that we can tap into,” Nash said. “I think other cities are looking closely at recycling and reusing their wastewater, which is what Oxnard has done.”
He called it an expensive ticket and hard ask to get the voters to accept what is, in many cases, a multi-hundred million dollar bond issue to build them.
“When I looked at the conveyance system at the State Water Project, I see so many red flags,” he said. “It crosses many fault zones, so it’s subject to destruction from earthquakes and seismic events. There are recent articles in the paper about climate change, and we are looking at potential multi-day storms that can literally turn the Central Valley into an inland sea, which is incredible. How would that impact the State Water Project?”
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