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 wat