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
Montecito’s Missing Water
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n June 15, Nick Turner, executive director of the Montecito Water District (MWD), gave a two-hour slideshow presentation to the public which outlined the agency’s proposed rate changes that will impact roughly 4,600 households. Thanks to a proposed 50-year Water Supply Agreement (WSA) with Santa Barbara, Montecito will receive a guaranteed supply of agua secured by the city’s recently restarted desalination plant, originally constructed in the late 1980s. Turner’s presentation was exhaustive to say the least, yet for anyone following the Montecito Journal’s ongoing series about Montecito’s complex history of procuring water for our naturally parched landscape, it didn’t deliver much news. Previous articles in the Journal detailed Montecito’s historic lack of water, MWD’s century-long effort to solve this problem, how negotiations with Santa Barbara began amidst a severe drought several years ago, and how the MWD’s then-board was unable to reach an agreement to purchase desalinated water from the city. That fact, along with controversy over emergency water conservation measures and, specifically, the levying of stiff penalties against the heaviest water users, led to the election of a new slate of candidates in 2016 and again in 2018, all of whom ran on the promise to bring “water security” to Montecito. There is one major component of Montecito’s water supply that has yet to be fully investigated in this series, yet which has everything to do with how much extra water Montecito currently needs as well as the question of who exactly should pay for it. The missing piece in this puzzle? Montecito’s local groundwater basin, a highly permeable (translation: leaky and almost use-
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