Environmental justice advocates are growing frustrated with California’s pace in solving one of the most perplexing water problems in the West. Nitrates in fertilizer and from dairy manure—some decades old—have led to groundwater contamination in drinking water wells in the San Joaquin Valley.
Yet state officials worry a heavy-handed approach would drive farms out of business.
In 2019 the State Water Resources Control Board gave the green light to a regional salt and nitrate control program known as CV-SALTS, knowing it could take as long as 35 years for certain areas to reach compliance. Five years later, the regional water board for the Central Valley has yet to pin down the magnitude of the problem and how exactly to address it.
That has led to frustrations from Laurel Firestone, a state water board member and former environmental justice advocate for community drinking water issues. She co-founded the Community Water Center in 2004.
“We're not doing enough to make sure people without safe drinking water now impacted by nitrates have safe water,” said Firestone, during a recent state water board hearing on CV-SALTS. “We need to figure out how we make that, how we do justice to the problem and the people that we're trying to address.”
After sampling wells throughout the valley, the state has determined that around 3,800 are above the safe level of 10 milligrams of nitrates per liter of water, with at least 7,000 people affected. About half receive bottled water or have access to filling stations in their communities.
Officials and advocates alike recognized the Herculean effort to implement CV-SALTS. The regional water board designated six nitrate management zones spanning more than 1.4 million irrigated acres and encompassing more than a thousand permitted dischargers—from farms and dairies to wineries, food processors and wastewater treatment facilities. Those dischargers established five nonprofit organizations to manage the plans and to develop the necessary funding mechanisms, hire technical consultants, conduct outreach, test wells and deliver bottled water, according to Tess Dunham, a water quality attorney for Kahn, Soares & Conway who has engaged in the issue for more than a decade.
“It's just astonishing when you think about what the management zones have accomplished in a very short timeframe,” said Dunham.
Tess Dunham, Kahn, Soares & ConwayState water board member Sean Maguire was excited about the activity and the potential solutions to come, but acknowledged the “huge lift” the state faces with reigning in water quality issues more broadly. In June the state water board published a drinking water needs assessment that detailed a funding gap of $5.5 billion over the next five years for clean water grants and a nearly $14 billion cost to communities and private well owners to achieve the state’s goal of providing safe and affordable water to all Californians.
Dunham cautioned the nitrate issue is “far more complicated” than simply developing long-term solutions for impacted residents. Nitrates may be just one of a variety of artificial or naturally occurring contaminants, and each area has its own unique set of problems, she explained.
Firestone, however, believed the management zones could accelerate the outcomes if they leverage resources already available through the state water board’s drinking water program and through closer collaboration with local groundwater sustainability agencies as they assess aquifers.
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“The more we remain in our silos and programs, it just slows it down and leads to frustration,” she said.
Board chair Joaquin Esquivel pointed out that California is decades ahead of other states in tackling nitrates and acknowledged the breadth of issues at play.
“Nitrates are one slice of what is a complex pie out there,” said Esquivel, who, like Firestone, probed for ways to speed up the process. “Of the solutions here, what's appropriate so that it doesn't lag behind here?”
Patrick Pulupa, executive officer of the Central Valley board, responded that staff are still in the midst of negotiating implementation plans for the highest priority management zones.
“We're currently going back and forth to figure out whether those are reasonable, whether they can be accelerated in some areas or not,” said Pulupa, who explained how a small staff is tackling a significant workload. “We’re eating the whale one bite at a time on our end.”
While the regional board’s traditional “wheelhouse” has been to find ways to reduce the nitrate load, it has also been racing to test wells and deliver replacement water to impacted communities.
“We'll figure out the rest—the funding packages, the long-term solutions—later,” he said, while stressing the need to prevent any potentially life-threatening disorders from water contamination. “The last thing we want is a child with methemoglobinemia to show up in the valley. That is our single driving effort.”
Pulupa also took heat from environmental justice advocates over the timeline.
“We need to figure out how to stop the pollution and clean up the basin,” said Jennifer Clary, state director at Clean Water Action. “We have to start taking action quickly, because the longer we take to start moving the needle, the more of a problem we'll have to solve.”
Clary pushed for more enforcement and a tighter timeline.
“How can a dairy be required to reach a nutrient balance in 10 years, but then still take 35 to reach compliance?” she asked.
Her colleague Kjia Rivers, a policy advocate at the Community Water Center, called that approach “neither aggressive nor justified,” since the dairies would not need any new technologies to reach an earlier milestone.
“I do beg to differ there,” responded Pulupa, who argued it would be “detrimental to the valley as a whole” to force farmers to cut their fertilizer applications in half by next year. “If you did that, you would see dramatic reductions in crop productivity across virtually all sectors of the agricultural industry in California.”
He asserted that no technology is available to enable farmers to comply while maintaining productivity. He assured the board his team is trying “our very best to make sure that the applicable timeframes are as short as practicable for every single sector.”
Firestone, however, maintained that collaboration has eroded in CV-SALTS as private entities in the management zones have taken the program out of the public eye and created a process more antagonistic to environmental justice communities.
“We really need to think about holistically doing a reset on dynamics here,” said Firestone. “I am troubled by the way I feel things have not been inclusive.”
Pulupa noted that many community voices have expressed gratitude for the program and that the regional board tries to be as open as possible.
“We're doing our best to rectify the problem with the tools we have,” he said.
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