In the race to meet California’s demand for newly legalized recreational marijuana, the Coachella Valley is blooming fast as the industry’s new farming hub. Trouble is, the region also suffers severe groundwater depletion, a problem that could be worsened by the popular crop.California voters approved Proposition 64 in November 2016, allowing the retail sale of marijuana to adults for recreational purposes from Jan. 1, 2018. Since then, several cities in the Coachella Valley have moved to embrace industrial-scale marijuana growing.
Leading the pack is Desert Hot Springs, a city of 28,000 people that has struggled in the shadow of Palm Springs for decades. As the city tilted toward municipal bankruptcy in 2014, it decided to embrace marijuana as a revenue source. Voters approved local ballot measures allowing the city to tax marijuana dispensaries and growing operations, and the city reclaimed a vast tract of mostly vacant industrial land to allow indoor marijuana cultivation.
Initially the city intended to embrace only medical marijuana, but the first growers who sought permits asked the city to add language allowing marijuana cultivation for recreational purposes, if that was ever legalized, long before Prop. 64 hit the statewide ballot. They got the language, and the proposition later passed.”An 18-hole golf course uses four to five times the amount of water one of these large cultivators would use,” he said. “We don’t think it’s going to impact our aquifers.
“It’s in kind of a state of flux right now, so we’ll just have to wait and see,” said Jeff Morgan, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Tahquitz Group. “I think there is limited demand, and I think it will be easily exceeded once you get a few large players in the game.”But no one knows how big the industry could get. Wall Street investors are already getting into the marijuana business, and one analyst projects U.S. sales of legal marijuana could grow nine-fold in the next decade alone.
The new growers in Desert Hot Springs will buy water from Mission Springs Water District, the local water and sewage treatment utility. The district relies exclusively on groundwater to meet all water demand in the area and has no other customers that could be defined as “agriculture.”According to its 2016 Urban Water Management Plan, the district’s primary aquifer has shrunk about 100 feet since the 1950s as a result of urbanization and scarce precipitation in the region. Overdraft is now estimated at 9,000 acre-feet per year, enough to serve 20,000 average homes annually.
Together with other water agencies in the Coachella Valley, in 2001, Mission Springs Water District began a program to replenish the aquifer with water imported from the Colorado River. This has begun to reverse the overdraft problem. The replenishment water is expected to be necessary for the foreseeable future to sustain the aquifer.”Right now, we don’t see a demand that exceeds our supply, or even, thus far, that threatens the sustainability of our supply,” said John Soulliere, spokesman for the Mission Springs Water District.
Other cities in the region have also opened their gates to marijuana cultivators, including nearby Cathedral City and Coachella. But none has been as inviting as Desert Hot Springs, said Greta Carter, partner of High Road Consulting Group, a firm working with a number of growers to set up cultivation facilities.
“I will tell you that, hands down, the city has been more embracing and receptive to our industry than others have,” Carter said. “Some cities will try to overregulate us. Desert Hot Springs has been rational about what the right amount of regulation is. We believe we have found a piece of heaven here, so we’re pretty excited.”
Mission Springs Water District is not imposing any unique water supply regulations on the marijuana industry, Soulliere said. Each new grower will get a water connection appropriate for their size and will pay a metered water bill, just like any other commercial customer.
The district is counting on growers to adopt tight water conservation measures to control costs, he said.Where growers could run into trouble is with the drain water they return to the sewage treatment system. The water district is requiring them to submit monthly testing reports, verified by an engineer, detailing any contaminants in the wastewater such as fertilizers and pesticides. They could be fined, for example, for excessive salinity, which would increase the water district’s treatment costs.
“A recent study led by scientists at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife estimated a single marijuana plant consumes as much as 6 gallons of water each day. That study focused on outdoor growing, and it soon came under attack by the industry, which argued a more accurate number is 2 gallons per day or less.
The 30,000-square-foot growing facility she has under construction will house about 10,000 marijuana plants under year-round growing conditions. At a half-gallon per plant, that equals the daily water consumption of about 16 average households, assuming household water use of 360 gallons per day.
Some of the new growing operations in Desert Hot Springs will be much larger, however. The city has approved one that will stretch over 1.8 million square feet. That’s as big as nine large Walmart stores. Another is proposed at 1 million square feet.
“For people to come in and be irresponsible won’t be tolerated,” Carter said. “No one should be fearful of us, because we’re under a microscope right now and we will continue to perform underneath that microscope.”
credit:upi.com
