Santa Barbara’s water supplies are on the way to recovery followed by three average or above-average rainy seasons.
The city’s water-supply forecasting shows there’s sufficient supply to meet demands through fall 2022, while allowing groundwater basins to slowly recover and rest, water supply analyst Dakota Corey told the city’s Water Commission at Thursday’s special meeting.
The availability of water from Gibraltar Reservoir, upstream on the Santa Ynez River, in the past few years as well as Santa Barbara’s desalination plant operation and water conservation have enabled the city to accumulate a significant amount of stored water in Lake Cachuma, Corey said.
The water-supply planning positioned Santa Barbara to continue resting its groundwater basins through fall 2022, Corey said.
The effects of the persistent eight-year drought have been extreme, however, and it will take several additional years to allow the groundwater basins to fully recover, Corey explained. It could take five to 10 years before the basins are completely replenished, based on observations following the last major drought, Corey said.
Santa Barbara hasn’t pumped groundwater since early 2017, according to Corey.
“We have no need to use groundwater in the next several years,” she said. “We can continue to rest our basins and let them recover.”
Corey provided a summary of Santa Barbara’s water-supply outlook.
“It was an interesting year in terms of the rainy season,” Corey said. “It started out with the driest January and February on record, and then we got a couple of storms in March and April, which brought our rainfall locally into the normal range.”
While it started out dry, the winter of 2019-20 resulted in average rainfall, with Santa Barbara’s Gibraltar Reservoir full. Lake Cachuma is at 80 percent capacity as of this week. Gibraltar Reservoir is anticipated to provide about 3,000 acre-feet of supply in 2020 — nearly a third of Santa Barbara’s needs, according to Corey.
Not all of Lake Cachuma’s stored water is Santa Barbara water, Corey said. Santa Barbara’s storage in Lake Cachuma is about 21,000 acre-feet, which is about two years worth of water demand for the city, Corey said.
For the current water year, the city received a full allocation — 8,277 acre-feet — for the Cachuma Project water supply.
Stream inflows that lingered on into middle and late April have left the reservoir water quality in good condition, Corey told the city’s Water Commission.
“It’s going to be a good resource for us this year,” Corey said, adding that Lake Cachuma last spilled in 2011.
An “abnormally warm” spring and summer are expected, which could lead to greater demands for landscape water use because evaporation and evapotranspiration will increase, Corey said.
“That would also increase evaporation on our reservoirs,” she said.
Water conservation and the city’s desalination plant will help recover from long-term drought impacts, according to Corey.
The most recent California drought map released by the U.S. Drought Monitor shows Southern California areas, including Santa Barbara County, are not experiencing drought conditions, Corey explained. Northern California is experiencing “abnormally dry to extreme drought” conditions, leading the California Department of Water Resources to issue a 15 percent allocation for the State Water Project, Corey said.
Santa Barbara will receive 495 acre-feet of its 3,300 acre-feet allotment from the State Water Project this year, Corey said.
“That’s driven by the hydrologic conditions in Northern California,” she said.
The city has 2,000 acre-feet of water debt to repay as a result of supplemental water exchanges during the drought years, Corey said. Santa Barbara plans to repay in the future when its State Water Project allocation is higher than 15 percent, Corey said.
“It has to be paid back with State Water,” she said.
Montecito Water District Water Supply Agreement
Santa Barbara’s Water Commission received an update on the status of the draft Montecito Water District water supply agreement, which has been drafted to implement conditions unanimously approved by the Santa Barbara City Council last year.
If the water supply agreement is approved, water deliveries will commence Jan. 1, 2022, and Santa Barbara will receive about $4 million in revenue annually for the delivery of 1,430 acre-feet of water a year to the Montecito Water District.
The water supply agreement was expected to be made publicly available for review on Friday, said Joshua Haggmark, the city’s water resources manager.
Haggmark described the water supply agreement as a “win-win” situation for both agencies and a “fair agreement for our community.”
In 2015, Santa Barbara entered into a contract to reactivate the Charles E. Meyer Desalination Plant on East Yanonali Street.
Around the same time, the Montecito Water District approached Santa Barbara with an interest in partnering in the reactivation of the city’s desalination plant to improve the reliability of the Montecito Water District’s water supply.
The desalination plant was originally conceived as a regional water supply, Haggmark said.
Extensive negotiations between the Montecito Water District and Santa Barbara occurred over several years.
“We have been in some state of negotiations with Montecito for almost five years now,” Haggmark said Thursday.
The Santa Barbara desalination plant has been producing potable water since summer 2017.
The Montecito Water District Board of Directors and Santa Barbara City Council approved a term sheet in 2019.
If everything goes as anticipated, the Montecito Water District board of directors and the Santa Barbara City Council will consider the water supply agreement at separate meetings in late June.
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
