District Approved Water Purchases Will Help, Not Solve, Mid County Water Shortage

By the Staff of the Soquel Creek Water District

The Soquel Creek Water District Board of Directors recently approved a Cooperative Water Transfer and Purchase Agreement with the City of Santa Cruz. The five-year agreement provides that the City may sell water to the District from its North Coast pre-1914 water rights sources. While the agreement is not about purchasing a large amount of water, it will help us reduce pumping to safeguard our limited groundwater supply.

To ensure that the City’s supply, residents, and endangered species are not negatively affected, there are several terms and conditions that will dictate whether or not water is available to sell to the District each year, including:

• The City has not declared, and is not operating under, any mandatory water curtailment stage of its 2009 Water Shortage Contingency Plan
• Loch Lomond Reservoir is full and is spilling, or if not spilling is projected to be full by April 1 of the water year during which water will be provided to the District
• The City is providing stream flow for aquatic resources that meet regulatory requirements

This winter’s predicted El Niño could satisfy the majority of these requirements, so the next step is meeting the regulatory compliance requirements for the project under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in a timely manner.

What this agreement is:

• A purchase. The District may buy water from the City with no expectations of the City receiving any water in return at a future date.
• Limited and conditional. The City is only able to sell the District water from its north coast sources, not from the San Lorenzo River, and only after satisfying the conditions above.
• A test. It is possible that water transfers could be expanded and used in the future to achieve passive ‘in-lieu’ recharge (where the District would use river water and reduce pumping from its production wells) or active recharge (injecting river water directly into the aquifer). During this five-year pilot test, the agencies can collect operational and water quality data to evaluate if a longer-term project is feasible.

At its core, this agreement is just a transaction that will allow the District to rest some of our wells and recharge the aquifers on a limited year-to-year basis, but it also gives us an opportunity to explore the possibility of a long term, large scale, in-lieu or active recharge program in the future that could meet a larger portion of our supply shortfall and address the City’s needs for supplemental water during droughts. This agreement is an important step toward the kind of regional collaboration and resource maximization that will be necessary to achieve a sustainable groundwater basin, but it’s important for our customers to recognize what the shortcomings of this potential near-term water purchase are as well.

What this agreement is not:

• Guaranteed. Due to restrictions included in the contract and climate variability, there is no guarantee when or how much water the District could actually receive in any given year.
• A ‘silver bullet’ solution. Water received in this transaction will help make up a small part of the annual shortfall, but an additional, drought-proof supply is still needed in order to reduce pumping to a sustainable level and prevent seawater intrusion from moving more inland.

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For more information about supplemental water supply options the District is pursuing, visit: www.soquelcreekwater.org/planning-our-water-future/back-supplemental-supply-options