Thirsty for more: Protest vote in New Cuyama fails to prevent water and sewer bill increases in its community services district

Just 11 votes prevented Cuyama residents from stopping a water and sewer rate hike at a Nov. 15 Cuyama Community Services District (CCSD) meeting. Only 86 of the 197 votes disapproved of the hike, 99 votes (or more than 50 percent) were needed in order to stymie the proposal.

Tensions ran high for a moment during the meeting held at a community center in Cuyama as residents awaited a vote count that would determine if they faced a rate hike. Malcolm Ricci, a board member for the CCSD, fielded a barrage of questions from the audience of residents, many of whom were visibly agitated at the prospect of an increase in their sewer and water bills.

click to enlarge Thirsty for more: Protest vote in New Cuyama fails to prevent water and sewer bill increases in its community services district
PHOTO BY DAVID MINSKY
WATER BILL BLUES: Members of the Cuyama Community Services District board of directors fielded questions from concerned residents on water and sewer bill hikes at a community meeting on Nov. 15.

Ricci appeared to have trouble keeping up as people doing the asking began talking over each other, raising voices, and demanding answers. 

“We’re here because of a problem,” one audience member barked at Ricci.  

The rate increase is just the latest problem facing the CCSD, which has been plagued by several water issues in this year. In addition to dwindling operational and emergency fund costs, a grand jury report in March highlighted institutional problems within the district. Adding to the water woes, the town of roughly 1,100 residents sits on a rapidly depleting aquifer that’s its sole source of water.  

Then in September, the Santa Barbara County Local Agency Formation Commission cleared the way to form the Cuyama Basin Water District, or a district of area growers and ranchers, which shares the same aquifer and led some residents to believe the district will essentially deplete the water even faster.

Unlike an incorporated municipality with a central government to provide services, New Cuyama instead has the CCSD—which is a resident-funded corporation that provides basic water, sewer, and street lighting services and whose board members are volunteers.

Now, the district has to answer to residents angry over the rate hikes that the district deems necessary to cover costs.

The CCSD had proposed a five-year plan that includes doing away with tiered water usage rates in favor of a flat rate of $0.75 per 100 cubic feet of water, increasing the base rate by $3 per year, and adding a $22 monthly surcharge to
residents’ bills. 

At present, yearly rates for a sewer/water bill for one household connection start at more than $1,640.
With the increases, a bill would rise to more than $170 per month starting in 2017 and increase to more than $183 per month in 2021. 

John Mackenzie is one of the residents who opposed the increases. He’s also a former district board member. Kicking off the unrest at the Nov. 15 meeting with the reading of a prepared statement, Mackenzie said the hikes would burden the economically disadvantaged. 

“The effect of the proposed increase will not fall uniformly on community members,” Mackenzie said. “There will be damaging outcomes if this rate structure is approved.” 

Mackenzie took issue with the estimated costs of electricity, which he believed were inflated. However, board member John Coats countered by saying there’s a significant correlation between the amount of water pumped and the electricity used. 

The electricity surcharge riled the crowd the most, since it would add more than $260 to the yearly CCSD bill. But according to Ricci, the surcharge was sorely needed since the district’s reserve fund had dropped to a critical point, plus costs for the system are going up
each year. 

“Operational costs to run the system are going up, including labor, insurance, electricity, change in costs of filtration chemicals, everything goes up,” Ricci said. “It would be nice if some of those things would come down. We’re trying to run as efficient as we can.”

According to Ricci, an incident during the summer—he suspects it was a power surge—fried both of the pumps, which deliver potable water to the town’s residents. The bill for replacing both pumps, as well as an entire well that was damaged in the operation, came out to around $180,000 and knocked the emergency fund to below $200,000. 

This is down from a reserve fund of more than $1 million in the 1990s, according to Coats. The fund was an endowment from the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company, which founded the original town of Cuyama back in the 1950s. 

“The district’s never ran without a substantial reserve fund,” Coats told the Sun. “We’re backed into a corner now because if we had a serious problem right now after we’re already on the hook for a new well, we could be in serious trouble.” 

The water system itself is aging. Put in place around the time of Cuyama’s founding, Ricci told the Sun that it has undergone several additions and repairs since then. 

California’s water infrastructure as a whole is in need of the most money—more than $44 billion—to improve systems that deliver safe drinking water to communities, according to a 2011 assessment conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Finding the money is an issue. A 2014 report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimated there was a funding gap ranging from $30 million to $160 million to provide drinking water in disadvantaged communities such as Cuyama. And according to the American Water Works Association, at least $1 trillion is needed to fix drinking water infrastructure in the U.S. 

Grant money has been hard to come by in recent years, Ricci said, although the district has been able to keep itself afloat with disadvantaged community assistance money since Cuyama was given this designation by the state. Recently, he added, the district has had to occasionally dip into its reserve fund to help pay for operational costs. 

Complicating things, according to the PPIC report, are the rigid requirements of Proposition 218, passed by California voters in 1996, which mandates that local governments require approval from property owners before increasing any taxes. 

In the case of Cuyama, the approval came when there weren’t enough protest votes to meet the more than 50 percent disapproval threshold in order to stymie the CCSD increases. 

At the end of the recent meeting, only 86 protest letters were tallied out of a total of 197, with each letter representing a physical connection to the water system. 

The board must vote to accept the results by its next meeting in December and then the rates go into effect by January. 

Staff Writer David Minsky can be reached at [email protected].

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