Saltwater corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren’t normally exposed to seawater. Gardeners know that small amounts of salt – added, say, as fertilizer – does not harm plants, but excessive salts can stress and kill plants.
We got around that in San Diego by already having several acres of evaporative pools to process sea water into salt at the south end of the bay. The desalinization plant is just helping our ability to create sea salt by dumping the waste salt product into an absolutely huge first stage evaporative “pond.”
If you wanted I can literally take pictures of the south end of the bay, and all the “salt ponds,” that we’ve, apparently, built, and are expanding.