Water shutoffs are coming, Guadalupe!
Total unpaid water bills in the city have apparently reached $250,000, and it’s time to bring the hammer down, according to city staff.
This is a problem that’s years in the making, according to City Administrator David Trujillo. Guadalupe’s stayed at a steady average of shutting off the water for about 10 customers per month, but that’s going up to 90 starting this month.
“Starting tomorrow, we’re going to start shutting off water,” Trujillo told the City Council on Oct. 13.
It was an “oh, by the way, this is happening,” as water shutoffs weren’t agendized for the meeting.
Some of the unpaid balances are close to $5,000—which is crazy! It sounds like those customers haven’t paid their bills for a lot longer than the 60 days that it takes to warrant a water shutoff.
“There’s some large balances,” city Finance Director Eli Martinez added. “A lot of big balances.”
Sounds like another big budget uh-oh in a city that’s had a lot of them in recent months. As the city’s former mayor put it in an opinion piece she wrote in September, “Guadalupe has a structural budget issue that needs to be addressed forthrightly, not through a culture of willful and knowing mismanagement.”
Frances Romero, who was mayor from 2012 to 2014 and likes to make public comments at the City Council meetings, also accused the previous iteration of city staff of mismanaging funds, not auditing financials, and ignoring grand jury reports that criticized Guadalupe.
Current staff, however, knows what they’re doing, she said.
And I feel sorry for them, because that means the bad news Trujillo and company have been laying on the City Council is probably going to keep on coming.
The Royal Theater reboot was canceled after wasting so much time and precious resources on the project, which everyone could see was a bad idea. Then, we heard that previous staff “intermixed” enterprise funds with general funds, which gave city officials an inaccurate idea about how many dollars the city had.
“You have competent professional staff for the first time in 12 years, listen to them for a change,” Romero said at the time. “[Past staff] apparently didn’t have any expertise at being able to balance a checkbook.”
Well, they apparently didn’t ask people to pay their water bills either. And now some of the city’s residents are looking at bills that seem pretty unsurmountable. If you owe the city $5,000 for water, you’re in deep doo-doo, people!
“It’s not a good place to be,” Mayor Ariston Julian said in the understatement of the year. “It’s good to be informed about it.”
Oversight, people.
That’s what a city council is supposed to provide—it makes policy decisions and ensures that the people appointed to do that work actually do the work the way that they’re supposed to. Guadalupe’s hasn’t done that.
Now that the city seems to have an administrator who pays attention to things like balancing the budget, perhaps the council will finally pull its head out of the sand.
Was it luck when the new Public Works director stepped in as interim city administrator at the end of last year? Sure seems that way.
The Canary is constantly wondering about Guadalupe. Send answers to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in October 22 – October 29, 2026.
