Ventura Harbor Commission Hears Ventura Water Pure Presentation

VENTURA⸺ In their April 6 meeting, the Ventura Board of Port Commissioners heard a presentation from civil engineer Adam Bugielski about the Ventura City Council project, the VenturaWaterPure program.

The proposed project plans to recover, treat, and reuse the city’s potable water, which is currently being discharged to the Santa Clara River Estuary.

The plan is to create a drought-resilient water supply in light of the recent drought conditions.

The project’s preferred option would run a pipeline through port district property, temporarily affecting traffic conditions, boat storage, and operation of businesses through temporary and permanent easements.

“We are going to continue to work on how we can best mitigate the impacts we are going to have,” said Bugielski. “…That includes boat storage, looking for somewhere we can temporarily store those, so people paying for storage still have access to them regularly whenever they need to. Traffic control is a big one. We do have traffic control plans that we are currently reviewing to make sure that the roads stay open and that all the driveways to the businesses stay open… So, we will be talking a lot more about that.”

The plan is to run a 7,300-foot conveyance main pipeline from the Advanced Water Purification Facility to Marina Park. Then the ocean outfall pipeline would run from Marina Park to 4,500 feet out into the ocean.

The pipeline is currently set to lay 70 feet below the channel after dredging, which should not hinder the harbor’s dredging projects.

Construction in the port is not expected to begin until 2023 and is set to take place on the port property for two to three months.

This will include a coordinated 8–12-hour closure of the harbor entrance outside Marina Park to launch the pipeline.

There will be a temporary sound wall and fencing in the boat storage off of Anchors Way near Harbor Town Point Resort, with a permanent pipeline under the parking lot, which will prevent construction over the area.

There will be a permanent 20 to 30-foot-wide easement for the pipeline and would potentially be able to eliminate existing utility lines in the area that have been abandoned.

A second temporary fence will be placed in the boat storage backing the Ventura Marina Mobile Home Park. The fence will be removed, and the pavement will be restored after construction.

The current treatment flow for Ventura takes used water from the community and sends it to the Ventura Water Reclamation Facility, where it is treated and then discharged. As a result, highly treated water is discharged to the estuary while only three percent of water is recycled back to the city for irrigation.

With the new project, water would be taken from the community, sent to the Ventura Water Reclamation Facility and the Advanced Water Purification Facility, then injected into groundwater wells to be mixed. This will hopefully improve the groundwater quality and then be extracted and sent to the Water Conditioning Facility before being recycled into the community’s water supply.

“As far as the city is concerned, this is our preferred option,” said Bugielski. “We are pursuing this route. We are using this route for our 60 percent word to the permit agencies, and assuming that they don’t say no, then we will know for sure. We are just waiting on their final word, and then we are ready.”

The project will submit its 60-percent design to permitting agencies like the California Coastal Commission within the month and expect to hear back near the end of the year, when they will have a better idea of the effect on the port.

The project is set to be completed by 2025.