the later VVT engines have significantly more room there. It looks like you could just carefully grind the back side of that water passage more flat, maybe trim off about .050 as at least looking at my parts pile it should clear or maybe just barely touch. I think you can make it work as it may just be a tiny bit of core shift in the block or intake or both keeping it from clearing. Maybe you could grind out the bolt holes a tiny bit to shift the intake back also then touch up the ports so they still line up. A little here and there should be enough unless you got a worse problem than I am seeing in your pic and my parts.