It’s been a weird wet season with extreme weather swings, but the reservoirs are brimming.
Santa Barbara’s Gibraltar Reservoir saw its wettest November on record, with more than nine inches of rain; and its second wettest December, with more than 16 inches.
Downstream from Gibraltar on the Santa Ynez River, Lake Cachuma, the chief water source for the South Coast, started spilling on Jan. 1 and didn’t stop until March 20, federal data show. It’s more than 99 percent full.
Still, the memory of scarcity lingers. During the drought of 2012 to 2018, Cachuma shrank to a pond in a bed of cracked earth. Supplies from the state aqueduct — like Cachuma, a source of “imported” water for the South Coast—dwindled to five percent of entitlements. Water basins were pumped to historic lows.
That’s when the push for “locally-controlled” water supplies began. In 2017, the City of Santa Barbara reactivated its desalination plant at a cost of $72 million. In 2021, the Montecito Water District signed up to pay $33 million of that amount in return for a 50-year supply of city water.
Now, an even more costly water project is about to break ground in the Carpinteria Valley—a $90 million system for converting wastewater to drinking water. It’s a joint project of the valley’s water and sanitary districts, and it’s the first of its kind in the county.
The purified wastewater, 1.3 million gallons per day, will be enough to supply a quarter of the valley’s yearly water demand, district officials say. It will be injected into the groundwater basin and stored there for months or years before it is delivered into people’s homes.
This kind of water recycling, called “indirect potable reuse,” or, more indelicately, “toilet-to-tap,” has been rejected by water agencies elsewhere on the South Coast as too expensive.
But, armed with $34 million in state and federal grants and a 30-year, $50 million low-interest loan from the state, the Carpinteria Valley agencies are moving full steam ahead. They serve 16,000 people from Toro Canyon to the Ventura County line, most of them city residents.
Construction on a pipeline for project will begin in late May, and a 12,000 square-foot wastewater purification plant will break ground in July, district officials said. It is expected to be up and running by mid-2029.
“This is a big deal,” said Craig Murray, the Carpinteria Sanitary District general manager. “We’ve been working on this in partnership with the water district since 2016. It will be a paradigm shift for our district, moving towards full resource recovery in recycling.”
Replenishing groundwater
The new plant will be located at 5351 Sixth St. in Carpinteria, next to the Sanitary District’s wastewater treatment tanks. At the plant, Murray said, the treated wastewater from those tanks will be purified to better-than-drinking water standards — effectively, to the quality of distilled water — using advanced filtration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and chlorine.
After it is injected into the groundwater basin, the recycled water will percolate through an “environmental buffer” of sand, soil and rock for months — and, in some locations, for decades, blending with groundwater — before it is drawn out by the water district, disinfected again with chlorine and delivered into residents’ homes.
County reports show that underground water levels in the Carpinteria Valley have been trending steadily upwards since the last drought, as they have in Santa Barbara and the Goleta Valley. But Carpinteria officials say they’re worried about ongoing seawater intrusion into the groundwater basin along the coast, even though it’s slow-moving and away from municipal wells.
“The primary driver is that during bad dry conditions, we had no allocation from Cachuma and a very small allocation from the State Water Project,” said Bob McDonald, who retired on March 31 after 26 years at the Carpinteria Valley Water District, first as an engineer and then as general manager.
“Between that and the low rainfall, it caused our groundwater levels to decline, and there are some areas that remain below sea level.”
McDonald noted that siltation continues to reduce the storage in Cachuma, and that some lake water must be released yearly for downstream users and steelhead trout. And, he said, the reliability of the state aqueduct “is going down every year.”
According to the California Department of Water Resources, state aqueduct deliveries amount to only 66 percent, on average, of what participating cities contracted for.
“In planning, we see that as a threat,” McDonald said. “We need to have a different source that is not susceptible to climate change and there’s no competition for it.”
Water recycling also has the benefit of reducing the amount of treated wastewater that Carpinteria, like every other South Coast community, ships out to sea through a pipeline on the ocean floor. Carpinteria’s project is expected to reduce the sanitary district’s offshore wastewater discharge — presently between 1.8 million and 2.5 million gallons per day — by 80 percent.
“It’s just a thrill when you see something getting built instead of just talking about it,” said Hillary Hauser, a co-founder of and strategic advisor to Heal the Ocean, a Santa Barbara-based group that promotes wastewater recycling. “Using the ocean to dump our waste is a crime.”
Rising water bills
On June 10, the Carpinteria Valley water board will hold a hearing on proposed water rate increases of 7.5 percent, 7.5 percent and 6.5 percent during the next three fiscal years, respectively, beginning July 1.
The increases are necessary, in part, to help pay for the future operating costs of the wastewater purification project, said Kelley Dyer, who replaced McDonald this month as the water district general manager.
In addition, the water board is proposing new monthly charges, also to help defray project operating costs, Dyer said. For single family homeowners, the new charges on their monthly water bills would be $3, $4 and $6 over the next three fiscal years, respectively. Owners of commercial and agricultural properties would pay more.
Finally, the board is proposing a new annual charge for the next three years on the county property tax roll to help pay the capital costs of the project, Dyer said. For single-family homeowners, the charge would be $54 for the coming fiscal year, $104 in 2028, and $111 in 2029.
Overall, Dyer said, the typical Carpinteria homeowner would be paying an additional $35 per month for water in Fiscal Year 2029, or $167 monthly, up from $132 monthly now.
In addition to the water purification plant, the Carpinteria project includes the construction of a mile-long pipeline from the plant to two new injection wells. These will be drilled at the western end of Meadow View Lane and on the grass playing field of Saint Joseph Church at 1532 Linden Lane. There also will be three new groundwater monitoring wells on the playing field.
The water district board has already signed off on construction bids for the plant and pipeline and environmental monitoring, Dyer said. The board will vote on bids for the injection and groundwater monitoring wells later this year.
Agricultural users account for about half of the valley’s water demand, but will not likely be pumping much recycled water from their private wells, Dyer said: the new injection wells will be closer to municipal wells.
‘Proven technology‘
Other California communities recycling wastewater for indirect potable reuse include Orange County, with a $900 million system, the largest in the world; and Soquel, Monterey, Cambria and Oceanside.
“What we’re doing is not new,” Dyer said. “It’s proven technology that has been used in a lot of other places. The water is purified to the extent that we have to add minerals back in before we send it out through the pipes and inject it back into the groundwater basin.”
Several dozen other water recycling plants, like Carpinteria’s, are in the works elsewhere in California, including in Pismo Beach, Morro Bay, Calabasas and the City of Los Angeles.
Closer to home, the City of Ventura is designing a $370 million wastewater purification plant as a result of a lawsuit brought by environmentalist groups. The city is under court orders to stop discharging treated wastewater into the Santa Clara River Estuary, a habitat for vulnerable birds and fish, by 2030.
As in Carpinteria, the Ventura plant would be part of an indirect potable reuse project, in which treated wastewater is purified and injected into the groundwater basin.
“Not in our future”
But for the foreseeable future, no South Coast agencies except Carpinteria’s are likely to follow suit. In Santa Barbara and the Goleta Valley, wastewater is recycled only for non-potable reuse on landscaping.
In Montecito, the lion’s share of the drinking water supply is used for irrigation, reducing the amount that can be collected for recycling. The Montecito Water District looked into indirect potable reuse, but “it was a costly project for a small amount of water,” Nick Turner, the general manager, said.
“The board put it on hold,” he said. “They committed to bringing it back if grants were available or it cost less money.”
Montecito’s groundwater basin is not deep, but surplus water from Cachuma and Santa Barbara could be stored in pockets there, Turner said. Accordingly, he said, the district is looking into retrofitting four wells as injection wells for groundwater replenishment. The cost would be $1.5 million.
Next door in Santa Barbara, the city studied whether to treat wastewater to drinking quality standards but discarded the idea, said Joshua Haggmark, the city water resources department director.
“It is in the future: it’s just not in our future,” he said. “… It really comes down to financials, and then it comes down to a need. Right now, with desalination, other supplies and conservation, we just don’t have a need to develop another new supply.”
This water year, Haggmark said, “has been a lot of whiplashes.”
“This is our future,” he said. “We’re getting to see the extreme that’s coming with it.”
With the next drought in mind, the city has been “resting” its water basin for the past eight years, relying on desalination to make up the difference, Haggmark said.
“Our basin is doing really well now,” he said.
‘So astronomical‘
Likewise in the Goleta Valley, the groundwater basin has nearly fully recovered from the last drought, officials said, because the Goleta Water District has been “resting” its pumps for the past five years.
“We want to maintain the groundwater basin as an emergency supply,” said Ryan Drake, water supply manager.
Unlike other South Coast communities, the Goleta Valley is not depending on any local supplies other than groundwater. During the last drought, the district looked into indirect potable reuse but decided against it, Drake said, adding, “The costs are so astronomical, it’s akin to building another desalination plant. It really doesn’t pencil out.”
Instead, the district spent $20 million drilling two new wells that can be used for both production and injection, Drake said. With these and some older injection wells, he said, the district has been pumping surplus Cachuma water into the groundwater basin for the past four years.
The Goleta district is one of a handful of water agencies in California that are permitted by the state to use treated reservoir water to replenish groundwater.
Conservation is critical, too, Drake said. Goleta residents are some of the most water-thrifty in the state: they use 51 gallons per capita per day, on average. Customer demand has dropped by nearly 30 percent since the height of the last drought and has “flatlined” since then, Drake said.
“That’s a lot of difference in permanent water demand,” he said. “Even in very severe drought years, even if we get our supplies cut by huge amounts, we can meet that lower demand without declaring any drought emergencies.”
