I recently caught up with Coronado City Councilmember Kelly Purvis to discuss her role as Coronado’s primary representative on the Metro Wastewater Joint Powers Authority (JPA) Commission and updates coming to the JPA agreement. Purvis has served on the Commission since January, when she took over as the City’s primary representative to the body for Mayor John Duncan.

The JPA represents 12 municipalities and special districts, called Participating Agencies, which all share the use of the City of San Diego’s regional wastewater facilities. The group recently voted on a new amendment to update the current JPA operating agreement, called the Second Amended and Restated Agreement (SARA).

“It’s a very interesting group of representatives, and I came in when the SARA was pretty much done,” Purvis commented, adding that Duncan’s legal expertise contributed a great deal to the work on SARA during his time serving as Coronado’s representative. “We received the document and the amendment, which we’re going to be looking at next Tuesday’s [city council] meeting. Basically, we’ve updated the agreement to be more appropriate for our usage, and for fairness to be equitable.”

Purvis explained that the document hasn’t been updated for nearly 30 years, and that wastewater use has changed a lot since then, and new projects and technology have also been introduced, such as the Pure Water facility, which will purify and recycle water.

“The [monetary] formula for our wastewater services is different under SARA, but actually it could lead to lower costs,” she noted of some of the changes included with the amendment. “Though you have to recognize that water is going to go up no matter what, but compared to how it could go up, with this formula, our costs will actually be lower than what we anticipated under the old system.” Purvis added that the newly proposed Functional Allocated Billing system calculates costs more accurately based on each Participating Agency’s use of the shared metro wastewater system.

She also explained that SARA will develop cost-sharing approaches for the first and, potentially, second phases of San Diego’s Pure Water Program, as well as a sample formula for calculating revenue from excess repurified water.

“This is a wastewater group, but we’re creating a billion-dollar project in North County called Pure Water. I was there last Thursday from 11:30 to 5:30 discussing wastewater and walking through the plant, and the fact that we can take water that is not usable to become water that is cleaner than the water that comes out of your tap…it’s amazing,” Purvis said.

“You walk in and it’s underground and two football fields long,” she described. “There’s an on-site lab that is amazing. They showed us the generators and the ozone building where the water starts, then it goes to the biological activated carbon filters. There are eight of them where water pours in and filters sediment out.”

From there, she explained that the water goes to a third purification stage —the membrane filtration feed tank —then to a fourth, for membrane filtration and reverse osmosis. Finally, the water undergoes a fifth and final purification stage involving UV light and advanced oxidation.

Purvis added that the facility, expected to be completed next spring, will include a center open to the public where people can learn more and take a tour. “They’re having people from all over the world come and check it out because it’s so state-of-the-art. It blew me away, and the SARA is important because this is one of the plants that we’ll be overseeing.

“And with water being such a rare and expensive commodity, it’s important to have it,” Purvis continued. “We’re at the mercy of a lot of people, and this project has the potential to not only make enough water for us, but to make water for others that we can sell.”

Alongside those pricing and revenue formula updates, SARA includes other organizational provisions to streamline and improve administrative and operational frameworks, such as how regulatory enforcement, fines, and so forth are handled in situations such as a wastewater spill. One of the other major updates Purvis mentioned was to the amendment’s proposed update to how voting will work within the JPA.

“Currently, a unanimous vote is required to make any changes, and what [the SARA] changes it to is a two-thirds vote, which I think is pretty fair,” Purvis commented. “There are enough small agencies that if something comes up that may be unfair to those small agencies, there would be no two-thirds majority. But we’ve always gotten along as a group, and as far as I can tell, things have always been unanimous.”

That said, the representatives of the JPA Participatory Agencies, Purvis included, had an advisory vote on October 2, 2025, to approve the SARA in an 11 to 1 vote. The SARA will now go to each Participating Agency municipality for a formal review and approval.

For Coronado, the SARA is expected to be discussed and voted on at the next city council meeting on November 18. “Coronado will make a decision on approving SARA…with the knowledge that there is one holdout and that we are working to try to bring them into the approval process, and if not, that we’ll have to explore our options and make a decision,” Purvis explained. From her experience representing Coronado in the JPA this year, she added, “I feel very positively about how this organization works to promote good stewardship and oversight of our water and wastewater.”

VOL. 115, NO. 47 – Nov. 19, 2025