h drains into the northern edge of San Pablo Bay and includes an area of 430 square miles
• Urban and residential areas, extensive vineyards and agriculture, and diverse environmental habitats
• Water users in the area rely on a mixture of water supplies that include local surface water, imported surface water, groundwater, and recycled water.
Let’s Focus on That Last Paragraph that Describes From Where We Get our Water
If you live in the municipalities your water comes from reservoirs (surface water) and from the State via the North Bay Aqueduct (imported surface water). In fact, more than half of Napa City’s water comes from the state.
If you live in rural Napa County your water likely comes from a well (groundwater). Agriculture uses groundwater and some surface water from the Napa River.
The county has reserved the groundwater for agriculture as stated in the General Plan Goal CON-Reg 11: “Prioritize the use of available groundwater for agricultural and rural residential uses rather than for urbanized areas and ensure that land-use decisions recognize the long-term availability and value of water resources in Napa County.”
The Problems and The Big Questions
The big issue is how much water will be available for use by residences, industrial, agricultural, and environmental uses in the coming years? The state has issued numerous reports on water security i.e., “Safeguarding California Implementation Action Plans 2016” to ensure that people and communities are able to withstand the impacts of climate disruption:
• Loss of snow-pack storage may reduce the reliability of surface water supplies and result in greater demand on other sources of supply”.
• “As climate change reduces water supplies and increases water demands (as a result of higher temperatures), additional stresses are being placed on the Delta and other estuaries along the California coastline.”
• “Each local water agency will have to contend with impacts to their local watershed, as well as upstream and downstream watersheds that influence local water supply or water quality constraints.”
With 80% of Napa residents living in the cities, what is the master plan to supply them with water when the state water project is no longer able to deliver and the reservoirs are compromised by drought and/or polluting runoff?
The Problem We Collectively Must Solve
How much water from all sources will be available and who gets to have it? We can study this to death; we can hire consultant engineering firms and pay them to develop numerous scenarios but we think we all truly know that the earth is warming, fire dangers are increasing, the weather is changing dramatically and therefore we ought to focus on planning for the worst-case.
In 2017 Napa Vision 2050 stated in a letter to the DWR that if all users of water in Napa County were to need to rely solely upon the groundwater we would be in an unsustainable situation. We still believe this to be the case.
Going Forward: A Clear, Consolidated Approach vs a Fractured System
Within the past month, LAFCO (our Local Agency Formation Commission*) issued a most comprehensive report, “Napa Countywide Water and Wastewater Municipal Services Review” (May 18, 2020). The report thoroughly covers the history and operation of the many water service providers with recommendations regarding their administration and operation.
It is of great significance that this report introduced the concept of a county water agency and/or a county water district. Benefits to forming such a county water district include:
• Efficient use of the County’s water resources
• Enhanced water resource management
• Solidarity amongst Napa water purveyors with greater leveraging power
• Greater scrutiny of all utility providers
• Enhanced technical and operational support for local providers
• Elimination of redundancies and duplication of efforts amongst the smaller systems
• Improved economies of scale.