Now that the Central Coast is getting drenched in rain, the potential for pollution in stormwater runoff isn’t lost on the city of Santa Maria.
On Feb. 21, the Santa Maria City Council considered a resolution to match dollars for a Proposition 1 grant from the State Water Resources Control Board to treat stormwater runoff. Proposition 1—the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act—was passed in 2014 and authorizes more than $7.5 billion in state money to fund ecosystems and to protect watersheds and water supply infrastructure, which includes groundwater supplies.
Specifically, the grant for Santa Maria would help improve water quality for the Main Street Subwatershed Improvement Project, which drains stormwater from approximately 1,150 acres of “dense urban area” into the Main Street Channel, which empties into the Santa Maria River, according to a City Council agenda report.
The project proposes to utilize abandoned sewer lines to divert and treat an estimated 300 acre-feet per year of runoff flow from the Main Street Channel. Currently, the runoff isn’t treated before it enters the river, according to the report.
This is problematic, according to Ileene Anderson, a Los Angeles-based senior scientist with the Center For Biological Diversity, because the runoff contains many urban pollutants like automobile residues that are dripped onto roadways and even waste from dogs and cats.
Even though the Santa Maria River has been mostly dry in the last several years of drought, Anderson said the current influx of water could make its way out into the ocean or into the aquifer below.
“There’s a big emphasis on cleaning up that water before it hits our waterways,” Anderson told the Sun. “Aquifers are eventually our drinking water supplies.”
Anderson is a wildlife biologist, but said she’s familiar with water issues because they affect wildlife and humans.
Water basins are often used for filtration, she said, and the microbes in the soil will deal with some of the pollutants as the water percolates, but not all of them.
The water board already awarded the city $852,926 in Proposition 1 funding, however the city is required to match $365,540 for a total budget of roughly $1.2 million.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 2, 2017.