There are three seats up for grabs this fall on the board that governs the Montecito Sanitary District, and five candidates have emerged.
The questions on everyone’s minds: Where should Montecito’s wastewater be treated over the next several decades, and what should happen with the district’s aging treatment plant?
Three candidates — Ellwood “Woody” Barrett, Chris Francis and Floyd Wicks — have thrown their full-throated support behind sending Montecito’s effluent (untreated wastewater) to the City of Santa Barbara for processing rather than rebuilding the sanitary district’s aging treatment plant.
The other two, Richard “Rock” Rockenbach and John Murphy, say they need more information before making a decision.
Candidates for a 2-Year Seat
Barrett and Murphy are running for the short-term, two-year seat. Both are currently on the board.
Originally from Texas, Barrett came to Montecito with his wife and three kids in 2001. He has served on the board for eight years.
He originally ran as a supporter of recycling water in Montecito and of consolidating with the Montecito Water District as a way to get that done.
While he was a strong supporter of consolidation with the water district (showing public support as lately as April of this year), he’s since moved away from the idea, he told Noozhawk in early October.
He also said if he wins the two-year seat this year, he doesn’t plan to run again.
“Ten years is enough,” he said.
Murphy was appointed in May, after longtime director Dana Newquist resigned over the question of consolidation with the nearby water district.
He and his family moved to Montecito roughly 25 years ago, when his kids were 1 and 3 years old. They were drawn to the Montecito Union School and Cold Spring School District, he said.
He initially applied to join the board because he wanted to serve his community.
He believed his 30 years of experience with mortgage lending and financial and capital markets would help the district as it prepares to tackle some large-scale capital improvement contracts in the years ahead.
The district is at “a bit of a crossroads,” he said. “Being an independent voice … I thought I could help with that.”
The 4-Year Seats
Rockenbach, Francis and Wicks are running to fill two full-term, four-year seats. Rockenbach is currently on the board.
Francis, a financial consultant, is a newcomer to the sanitary scene.
He, his wife and their two young kids moved to Montecito in 2020 from Los Angeles.
He decided to jump into the race because he was concerned about growing rates and the Montecito plant’s discharge to the ocean, he said.
Wicks made a career out of working in the water sector.
He has spent the past decade on the board of the water district.
He, his wife and their son moved to the area in 1985 from Ohio, left for a handful of years, and returned for good in 1992.
He still has two years left on the water district board, but decided to jump into the sanitary district race because he wants to “go back to my roots.”
He did his master’s thesis in civil engineering with a focus on sanitary engineering and worked for a sanitary district in Ohio when he was in college.
He originally ran for the water board in 2016 after a historic drought — and subsequent rationing — hit Montecito hard.
Rockenbach is a lawyer who medically retired from the Air Force in 2009 after he was injured in the line of duty.
He grew up in Montecito, left in 1990, and returned in 2020 with his two kids and his wife, Jan.
(Jan Rockenbach, who is also a lawyer, is on the board of the Montecito Planning Commission.)
He has served on the sanitary district board since July 2025 by appointment, and became the board’s president last December.
While on the board, he has been an opponent of consolidating with the water district, arguing that it would kill any chance of recycling Montecito’s wastewater given the water district’s current position.
Send Effluent to Santa Barbara or Keep It In Montecito?
Montecito’s wastewater treatment plant was built in the 1960s. Some parts are now beyond their useful and serviceable life. Some replacement parts are no longer manufactured and are being bought from eBay, according to district staff and board members.
Its electrical system is ungrounded; a bulletproof wall was installed in the operator room a decade ago to protect workers from a possible arc flash explosion.
A study flagged treatment deficiencies as early as 2004.
A 2021-22 study found that while the plant is in fair working order, many treatment processes are past their “useful” life.
In addition, a 2024 study, done after the extremely wet winter of 2023, found that some of the plant’s in-ground treatment structures need to be replaced or extensively remediated.
Without “substantial investment,” there will be “great risks” to the plant’s ability to treat Montecito’s wastewater moving forward, per district staff.
Francis, Barrett and Wicks are running as a slate of board candidates, urging Montecito residents to vote for all three of them.
Barrett and Wicks are part of the “Water Security Team” that fought for and held onto the sanitary and water districts seats over the past decade. At the time, the candidates had discussed merging districts, pursuing recycled water, and buying water from the City of Santa Barbara. At the time of that 2016 election, Barrett was a candidate and Wicks, a water board member, helped fund the slate of candidates.
The water district board also voted in 2024 to put the issue of recycling water in Montecito to rest, citing the high cost, after a joint water- and sanitary-funded study.
Now, Barrett, Wicks and Francis say sending effluent to Santa Barbara is the solution to the community’s wastewater treatment future.
By their own estimates in favor of a “regional” plan, sending to Santa Barbara would be cheaper than rebuilding the plant. They also think it could save taxpayers money in the long run, saying that Santa Barbara can treat wastewater cheaper than Montecito.
They’re throwing a decent chunk of money behind their belief. As of Monday, campaign finance records show that the “Woody Barrett, Chris Francis & Floyd Wicks for Montecito Sanitary District 2026” campaign has received a $10,000 loan from Robert “Bob” Hazard Jr. and a $9,999 loan from Barrett himself.
Hazard, the former president of the Birnam Wood Golf Club and former Montecito Journal editor and columnist, bankrolled the “Water Security Team” slates in 2016 and 2018.
The three candidates also sent out a mailer across Montecito, directing residents to montecitocleanwater.com and calling out an “opposition” they say wants to design and rebuild the plant for a cost up to $100 million.
The mailer further attacks the sanitary district’s practice of treated wastewater discharge happening about 1,500 feet offshore Butterfly Beach. This is also what nearby Goleta, Santa Barbara and Carpinteria sanitary districts do, with their own outfall pipelines.
“It’s clear” by the time it hits the ocean, Barrett said, but “you can’t drink it. You don’t want to drink it.”
The 2010 map used in the mailer depicts ocean circulation patterns, not wastewater discharge. It was commissioned for a study by sanitary board member Carter Ohlmann — who is not up for election this year — authored as a research oceanographer at UC Santa Barbara, Ohlmann said in a letter published in the Montecito Journal last week.
He also wrote that the report found the discharge was not responsible for “adverse water quality” off Butterfly Beach.
Rockenbach and Murphy aren’t firmly for or against sending effluent to Santa Barbara or rebuilding the plant at this point in time.
While they both believe addressing the plant’s infrastructure is critical — and that it must be stabilized even if it isn’t rebuilt completely — they want more time to decide which long-term option is better for the community.
The city has not yet agreed to take Montecito’s effluent. It isn’t known exactly how much the city would charge to take it. It is also unknown how much it would cost to build a pipeline and pump system to transfer the wastewater to the Santa Barbara treatment plant, which is about 2.5 miles away from the sanitary district’s plant at 1042 Monte Cristo Lane.
The sanitary district board recently ordered staff to contact Santa Barbara to get information about how much wastewater the city could process, but that information will not be available before the election wraps up. A study ordered last year is also underway to figure out the exact cost of rebuilding the plant versus sending effluent to Santa Barbara.
Rockenbach disagrees that it would be much cheaper to send effluent to Santa Barbara than to rebuild the plant, in part because there are a lot of unknown factors.
In addition, even if the effluent is sent to the city, the “cracking” pipes and other equipment that would remain under Montecito control still need to be addressed, he argued.
He is also concerned about sending Montecito’s effluent under the control of a City Council that Montecito residents do not vote for.
While Rockenbach has endorsed Murphy on his campaign website, they are not running as a slate.
Neither of them had reported campaign fundraising as of Monday, according to County Elections Office records.
Will Rates Go Up Under Either Plan?
As decided by a Montecito Sanitary District board vote earlier this year, the board is allowed to raise rates up to 14% per year for the next five years.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that rates will go up that much over five years for the district’s roughly 3,150 ratepayers. It only gives the board the option to vote to do so on a year-by-year basis.
Before June, sanitary district rates hadn’t been raised since 2019.
Wicks, Barrett and Francis said in their mailer that those increases are the cost of rebuilding the plant. They also pointed out that Montecito has the highest wastewater treatment rates along the South Coast.
Rockenbach called those possible increases the cost of not raising rates for years.
Montecito’s rates are also high because of the affluent area’s “glorious lack of density,” he rebutted, meaning that there are simply fewer customers to charge per mile of pipe.
Montecito residential property owners pay fixed rates based on the type of parcel, regardless of size.
Commercial customers — of which there are few under sanitary district control, given that Coast Village Road falls within city of Santa Barbara boundaries — pay based on the sewage amount and water usage.
For the current fiscal year, single-family residences pay $1,650.93 per year, while condos pay $766.20 per year. That is up from last year’s $1,480 and $696, respectively.
The election is set for Nov. 3. Ballots were mailed out to all registered voters last week.
