Santa Maria is looking to obtain an allocation of state water that has been suspended since 1981. The Santa Maria City Council passed a resolution calling for as much during its meeting on June 2 and authorized Mayor Alice Patino to seek such a deal with the Central Coast Water Authority.
“We would be remiss if it went out of Santa Barbara County,” Councilmember Jack Boysen said during the meeting.
Basically, 12,000 acre feet of water could be coming down the pipe to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties thanks to the Department of Water Resources, which operates the State Water Project—600 miles of plumbing constructed in the 1960s to transport water up and down the state. Santa Barbara County acquires state water through the Central Coast Water Authority (CCWA), which manages the branch of the State Water Project running through SLO and Santa Barbara counties. Santa Maria wants a big piece of that water but is competing with other Central Coast water purveyors for it.
“We’ve gone through other droughts before, and this has never been brought up before,” pointed out Councilmember Etta Waterfield. Why, she asked, was this water set aside in the first place?
Water allocations can be complicated, but this one boils down to simple math. The coastal aqueduct, by which water is transported to CCWA, is sized to move about 45,000 acre-feet a year. The CCWA was originally allocated 57,000 acre-feet of water. That’s about 12,000 acre-feet more than the aqueduct can transport when it’s running at full capacity. So, that 12,000 was suspended in 1981 and has remained so since.
Aqueducts running at full capacity, however, are an endangered kind of public works project in these dry days. The branch serving the CCWA is currently transporting water at about half of its full capacity. That frees up enough space for the suspended allocation of the 12,000 acre feet to be reintroduced.
Now, the CCWA is talking to the state and trying to get that water back. Different cities in the region are declaring their “purchase intent”—how much water they’d like. Santa Ynez and Solvang are looking for a slice of the pie, Santa Barbara is still deciding, and Santa Maria has declared their purchase intent for the whole 12,000 acre-feet. The CCWA will decide who gets what after they’ve looked at everyone’s purchase intent.
This article appears in Jun 11-18, 2015.
