Drilling a non-agricultural water well in an area of Santa Barbara County that’s already served by a water district is about to become more burdensome thanks to what 1st District Supervisor Das Williams see as a significant issue in Montecito.
“It’s generally a bad idea to be permitting wells that feed off an existing system,” Williams said during a June 18 hearing on the issue. “I do want to make sure there’s water available to my constituents, and I want to slice this as thin as I can.”
Water well drilling permit applications in the county peaked during the drought at more than 200 in 2014 (a large percentage were for Montecito, but no specifics were indicated) but are beginning to decrease back to historical averages, according to a report presented to supervisors at the meeting.
The Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 (with North County supervisors Peter Adam and Steve Lavagnino dissenting) during that meeting to significantly change the permitting process for new non-ag water wells on properties that essentially pull water from municipal sources. Williams made the motion directing county staff to come back with changes to the county’s water well drilling ordinance that require a discretionary permit application and flow meters for wells drilled in those areas, something the California Coastal Commission recommended in a 2016 letter to the county.
As the ordinance stands now, anybody applying for a water permit can get one without too much hassle through what’s known as a ministerial permit.
“It’s not something that we have a choice of saying no on, and we inspect the wells to verify it was constructed with the state adopted standards and the standards of our code,” county Environmental Health Director Larry Fay told the board. “There are a couple of exceptions.”
Those exceptions include wells that are drilled to serve a small rural community or wells drilled with the purpose of exporting water for profit. Both would require a conditional use permit, and Fay said he doubted that anyone wanting to export water would qualify for a permit. Water wells drilled in the coastal zone, which falls under California Coastal Commission jurisdiction, require a development permit (issued at the discretion of the commission).
And although Williams’ specific interest had to do with what he said were hundreds of additional wells pulling out of Montecito’s municipal water source, Adam said the board’s decision would affect more than just property owners in that South County community.
“We’re taking the water away from the people who are here now. … For us to say something like, ‘They’re immoral users of water,’ is just ridiculous,” Adam said, referring to an earlier statement Williams made. “We’re shoving difficulty on everybody else for one area of the county.”
Adam had previously introduced a motion that would have exempted agriculturally zoned areas, consolidated rock aquifers, litigated basins, and basins under management of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). There are four basins in the county that SGMA considers to be a high to medium priority, and those are all in the process of creating groundwater sustainability agencies. Although Montecito will eventually be subject to SGMA as well, it’s considered a low priority, so forming a management agency could take years, Williams said, thus an interim plan was needed.
Priority was assigned to basins according to how important groundwater was to an area—Santa Maria, Santa Ynez, Cuyama, and Los Alamos rely heavily on groundwater, therefore those areas were assigned a higher priority than Montecito. Matt Young, who works on SGMA for the county’s Public Works Department, told the board that in 2006, when the prioritization happened, there weren’t a lot of water wells drilled in Montecito.
“And since that time, a ton of wells got drilled,” Williams said.
This article appears in Jul 20-27, 2017.