The Grand Jury Report on Drought Resilience Missed the Boat
Jim Mosher, Mark Dolson and Lee Summers
June 29, 2022
The Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury recently issued a report entitled Our Water Account Is Overdrawn—Beyond Conservation: Achieving Drought Resilience. Although water resilience is an important topic, the probe omitted several key issues facing the San Lorenzo Valley Water District (SLVWD).
The report correctly asserted that water agencies needed to collaborate. To that end, the Santa Margarita Groundwater Agency (SMGWA) spent the past six years producing a Groundwater Sustainability Plan for the San Lorenzo Valley watershed, submitted this past January.
The Grand Jury also correctly identified two limitations to the current collaborative process: (1) SMGWA’s plan does not explicitly address the County’s response to drought, and (2) there is room for improvement in how effectively the various agencies work together.
However, the Jury’s attempt to shed new light on a complex topic without conducting a sufficiently thorough investigation led to a report that barely mentioned SLVWD. Its 51 references included not a single SLVWD or SMGWA document. Yet SLVWD is on the front line when it comes to protecting the San Lorenzo River and watershed – the primary water source for all of North County.
Omitted from the report were huge SLV challenges for building drought resilience in North County:
The CZU fire caused more than $70 million of damage to District infrastructure, including the destruction of a seven-mile pipeline linking three surface water sources to treatment facilities. No other major water district in the County suffered this kind of damage.
The fire highlighted the importance of hardening and upgrading the District’s infrastructure – a long-term, expensive, and staff-intensive task.
The fire severely damaged three small, independent water districts in the Santa Cruz Mountains – Bracken Brae and Forest Hills Water Districts and Big Basin Water Company. All three are seeking a merger with SLVWD, which is their best solution for recovering from the fire damage. However, the mergers raise numerous technical and legal challenges for the District that requires extensive staff time and the expertise of outside consultants.
While SLVWD struggles to address these and other issues critical to building North County drought resilience, its customers face more rate increases even though they pay among the highest prices in the county. Rather than overlook these problems, a truly effective collaboration would seek ways for the County to assist SLV in its time of need.
Ironically, the Grand Jury report commended the Santa Cruz City Water Department for its collaborative efforts, but ignored the Department’s lengthy protest of SLVWD's petition. The District had petitioned to improve its own drought resilience by transporting its surface water in the winter months to areas with wells for recharging the aquifer. As a result, the District will have to produce an expensive Environmental Impact Report that will delay this conjunctive use project for years.
The deeper issue here is that neither resources nor impacts are evenly distributed throughout North County. Even though the individual water districts have good collaborative intentions, each must answer to its own constituents first. Since the urban districts have superior resources and greater pressure to expand their access to water, it is natural that they take the lead. However, overlooking the unique issues confronting the SLV will ultimately increase the very vulnerabilities that the Grand Jury seeks to rectify.
SLVWD and its ratepayers are important stewards for the San Lorenzo River watershed, and the health of the watershed is critical to the long-term water delivery and drought resilience for North County. Its challenges should have been the central focus. It’s too bad the Grand Jury missed the boat.