ON THE RECORD
Nicholas Schou
Nicholas Schou is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of several books, including Orange Sunshine and Kill the Messenger. If you have tips or stories about Montecito, please email him at newseditor@montecitojournal.net
Will Montecito Go Full Speed Ahead with Desalinated Water?
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his month, roughly 4,600 households in Montecito and Summerland received a special insert along with their monthly water bill. “WATER RATE UPDATE!” the flyer declared in urgent all caps, adding that the “Montecito Water District has Plans for Delivering a Secure Water Future.” Stating that its customers “want their drinking water to come from local, reliable supplies with stable, predictable and affordable rates,” the agency announced that, effective July 1, it is entering into a long-term water sharing agreement (WSA) with Santa Barbara to purchase a portion of the city’s desalinated water. “The city’s desalination plant provides the foundation for the WSA, which will cement a regional partnership in water management and provide our customers with a flexible, drought-resilient supply at a guaranteed cost for the next 50 years,” the flyer states. The agency’s recent bill-insert assures customers that the deal is necessary to avoid dependence on unreliable and drought-prone regional sources like Lake Cachuma as well as the State Water Project, which provides water from the Feather River in Northern California to numerous water districts throughout the state. The agency’s official analysis of the water-sharing deal states that while some customers will pay more for their water with the proposed water rate changes, the majority of rate-payers –56 percent in fact – will either enjoy a decrease or see no change to their monthly bill. 73 percent of customers, they promise, will either pay less or see no more than a $20 per month increase in fees. Yet some former water district officials as well as local water conservation proponents who spoke with the Montecito Journal couldn’t disagree more with the agency’s plan. They claim the current board’s proposal is irresponsible because it commits Montecito to purchase a half-century’s worth of desalinated water, which is among the most expensive water to produce, whether the town needs the water or not during any particular year. They also worry about the fact that MWD is pushing forward with this scheme during the COVID scare, meaning that the only public hearing on the deal, tentatively scheduled for June 3, will likely have to take place via Zoom, meaning that even fewer members of the public than usual will be able to participate in any debate over the plan. Water District Board member Cori Hayman told the Montecito Journal that she and her colleagues have worked strenuously during the past several years to bring water security to what she referred to as “this side of the mountain,” in other words, without having to rely on Lake Cachuma, the State Water Project, or purchasing water from other districts further inland. According to Hayman, the overall supply and delivery over water to Montecito is complicated by the fact that Lake Cachuma is subjected to numerous delivery constraints, safeyield restrictions, downstream rights, and fisheries, all of which explains why, at the peak of the recent drought several years ago, the district was on the verge of having to approve emergency-based water rationing. Additionally, Hayman said, the State Water Project is projected to deliver no more than 40 percent of the district’s full allocation of water in future years. “I believe we received only 15 percent of our contracted amount this year,” she added. “Water supply availability was continuing to decline to the point where if the drought had continued beyond 2016 at the same severity we were experiencing, we would have been nearly 100 percent reliant on the State Water Project pipeline which has a limited capacity, about a quarter less than we were providing to our customers at the time,” said Nick Turner, the water district’s general manager. A long-term water supply agreement with Santa Barbara, he added, is a cost-effective way to ensure a local and reliable supply of water for the community. Because of the fact that Montecito will be paying up-front capital costs stemming from the plant’s original construction, a long-term deal helps avoid the possibility that once the plant has been paid off, Santa Barbara might simply end the agreement or increase the price of its water. “An agreement extending beyond 50 years would ensure the district will benefit from the plant capital costs being paid off,” he explained. Whereas the proposed deal is estimated to cost approximately $3,000 per acre foot in one year, Turner said that the State Water Project costs considerably more based on its current and projected reduced future availability. “The State Water Project costs Montecito approxi-
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mately $6 million per year in fixed costs, whether we are allocated all the water or not,” he said. “This year, based on a 15 percent allocation, we are paying over $12,000 per acre foot for that water.” According to Turner, the water district is investigating the possibility that it can sell any excess desalinated water to other water districts. “The district is in the process of pursuing opportunities to lease water that is surplus to its needs on an annual basis, and that will be used to offset the cost of the water sharing agreement.” Meanwhile, climate change is expected to make state water increasingly expensive and unreliable. “We expect climate change to cause more frequent droughts of longer duration. Supplies are dwindling and becoming less available every year, so having a supply in our backyard is a prudent thing to do.”
“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”
As any student of California history knows, the world’s fifth largest economy wouldn’t exist without an elaborate, century-long endeavor to harness and distribute water from lush northern watersheds to the vast agricultural fields of the Central Valley and the sprawling suburbs of the Southland. It is impossible to exaggerate the state’s dependence on this precious resource. According to Carolee Krieger, president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network (CWIN), an estimated 29 million acre feet (the amount it takes to cover an acre with 12 inches of water) falls as rain or snow in California each year. But each year that water is supposed to service 153.7 million acre feet in annual water-rights claims.
The story of water in Montecito is a long and complicated one. Although it is cloaked in environmental rhetoric, it has, at its core, much deeper issues involving the privileges of power and money, political access and the lack thereof. To understand the debate over water requires an understanding of the various constituencies in Montecito, the land on which they reside, and what lies beneath it.
The damming and diversion of water and competition over the right to its use has led to some staggering political skullduggery over the decades, chief among them the creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which led to the so-called California Water Wars of the 1930s and the deliberate obliteration of Owens River agriculture, as famously depicted in the 1974 film Chinatown. Unfortunately, water politics tend to be so complicated that the general public is largely ignorant of the source of their water and unprepared to hold local officials accountable over how it is used, who pays for it, and how much. The story of water in Montecito is a long and complicated one. Although it is cloaked in environmental rhetoric, it has, at its core, much deeper issues involving the privileges of power and money, political access and the lack thereof. To understand the debate over water requires an understanding of the various constituencies in Montecito, the land on which they reside, and what lies beneath it. Beginning with this story, the Montecito Journal will be publishing a series of articles with the intention to spark a long-overdue public dialogue about the politics of water usage, reliance on regional and statewide infrastructure, drought-related insecurity, desalination, and conservation. This series will focus on several aspects of the history and politics of water in Montecito, including a contentious election over seats on the Water District Board in a town that rarely sees competitive elections. In 2018, a group called the “Water Security Team” ran a slate of candidates in a successful attempt to unseat existing Montecito Water District (MWD) incumbents while also winning seats on the Montecito Sanitary District’s board. The expressed intention of this well-financed campaign: to rectify the longstanding lack of communication and cooperation between the two agencies. Yet critics claim the effort represents a handful of wealthy campaign donors whose motive is to cement political control over both agencies. Aside from MWD’s proposed water-sharing plan, which is the primary focus of this piece, the series will also explore Montecito’s complicated relationship with other water districts as well as with the state of California, particularly the State Water Project. It will also explore the recently passed State Groundwater Sustainability Act, which required all water districts in California to regulate ground water consumption. This is a matter of particular relevance to
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“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Dorothy Parker
21 – 28 May 2020
