Criteria for Evaluating Water Supply Strategies

    Moss Landing Gas-fired Electric Power Plant

Criteria for Evaluating Water Supply Strategies

This report evaluates strategies to achieve a sustainable water supply. Those strategies fall into two categories: new water supplies and conservation. The mission statement of Transition Santa Cruz cites core values with which to guide evaluation of water strategies.

Environmental Sustainability
A core Transition value is “Sustainability: Meeting our needs without degrading the ecosystem for future generations”.

Groundwater
Groundwater pumping should not exceed the sustainable yield of the aquifer. By sustainable yield, we mean an amount of water pumping that doesn’t permanently damage the aquifer through saltwater intrusion or subsidence of the ground. It also means avoiding a level of aquifer pumping that compromises the stream flows necessary for fish and wildlife.
In our coastal community, groundwater overdraft has become a way of life. In the Pajaro Valley, a quarter century of basin management by the Pajaro Valley Water Management Association has not stemmed the salt-water intrusion extending a mile and a half inland. Wells near the coast have been abandoned. Farther north, in the Purisima Aquifer beneath Live Oak and Soquel, monitoring wells near the coast show signs of increased salinity.

Surface water
Diversion of water from coastal streams should not result in degradation of habitat for native fish and other wildlife. At this moment we have arrived at the choice between continuing levels of water diversion from coastal streams, or survival of native fish. The fact that we would even consider sending fish species into extirpation (local extinction) means we have over-reached nature’s limits. If Santa Cruz and other communities around the world cannot stop sending local fish into extinction, then a food source of importance to billions of people becomes scarce. Transition Santa Cruz believes that the path to living within nature’s limits is the only path in which humans can prosper in the long run.

Energy and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The electric power associated with providing our community with water derives from PG&E’s power, half of which is generated from fossil fuel powered plants. We need to minimize the electric power consumption powering our water use.

Equity
In the Transition Santa Cruz mission statement is the value, “Equity: Meeting the needs of all.” Up until the present, the water needs of our community have been met at a low cost. The question needs to be asked of any new water supply strategy, “Who pays and who benefits?” Water supply solutions should be evaluated for their impact on the living expenses all members of the community.

Local self-reliance
Santa Cruz is one of the few counties in the state that relies exclusively on water within the county. And water from surface sources (streams, river) arrives at the tap powered mainly by gravity. In evaluating water supply strategies, this report places a value on meeting local needs locally.

Community Regeneration
We love children and grandchildren just as much as any society. Yet we have inherited a culture in which resources are exploited without much thought for future generations. Changing the culture of exploitation is profoundly difficult. The culture of exploitation has left us a legacy of beliefs, such as, “There is an inevitable conflict between human needs and the natural world. If we choose nature, humans will suffer.”  In fact, unless human needs become harmonized with the ecosystems in which we live, humans will be the ultimate losers.

Faced with the reality of the need to change our relationship with nature, we tend to get frightened about what that means for us. We tend to think in terms of individual hardship because we don’t have the experience of collective security (think “All for one. One for all.”) to count on. The notion that our community can come together in transforming its relationship to nature is foreign to our experience.

Transition Santa Cruz considers its central task to be “Community Regeneration: Reestablishing our local interdependence and reclaiming power over our lives in our neighborhoods, communities, and workplaces.” We believe that the era of declining fossil fuels affords us the opportunity to come together as a community. Shrinking resources will make it more apparent that we need each other to survive and prosper. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, this enhanced community “confers joy”.

The process of choosing water supply strategies needs to include a broad community discussion. This discussion includes not only how to meet current needs sustainably, but how to accommodate growth and set limits on growth. This report considers the following choice to require a fully informed community process:
•    “How much conservation are we willing to engage in, or how much financial investment are we willing to make,  in order for population growth to occur?”

William Ruckelshaus recently wrote in the Wall St. Journal, “People affected by change have to be deeply involved in the crafting of solutions—they are going to pay for them either economically or through changes in how they live. We need more democracy, not less.”1

1 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230341040457515164096311489...
 

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