Skip to content
Montecito Groundwater Sustainability Agency to Consider Adopting Management Plan | Local News
The Montecito Water District and private well owners rely on the groundwater basin for water supplies, and for the past five years, the Groundwater Sustainability Agency has been working on a long-term management plan.
The GSA board members, who are also on the water district board, will meet Friday to consider adopting the Groundwater Sustainability Plan and submitting it to the California Department of Water Resources.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act created seven groundwater sustainability agencies in Santa Barbara County. The SGMA requires groundwater basins designated as medium priority (like Montecito’s) or high priority to be sustainably managed.
“Groundwater is an important local source of water that is heavily relied upon by our entire community, particularly during drought. To that end, our sustainability goal is to prevent undesirable results and optimize long-term use of the groundwater basin for the benefit of all stakeholders,” GSA board president Brian Goebel wrote in the forward for the draft plan.
“Based on all available information and our locally defined Sustainable Management Criteria, the basin is currently not experiencing undesirable results as defined by SGMA. Nonetheless, Plan development revealed areas where we would benefit from additional information about the Basin.”
The GSA will keep pursuing grant funding and stakeholder involvement as it implements the plan, he added.
Read the Montecito GSA draft plan here.
The Montecito Groundwater Sustainability Agency meeting is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. Friday at the water district, 583 San Ysidro Road in Montecito. Members of the public can attend in person or by Zoom.
View the agenda and Zoom link information here.
A big question for Montecito’s GSA has been how much water is being pumped out of the basin.
The Montecito Water District has six potable groundwater production wells and six non-potable wells to support irrigation. There are hundreds of private wells.
According to the draft plan, a DWR contractor estimated water demand and groundwater extraction for Montecito-area properties with wells.
“Between 1970 and 2015, private wells have accounted for between 54% and 95% of the total extractions in the Montecito Groundwater Basin,” the draft plan states.
“Private well extractions steadily increased from 1970 through 2014, averaging approximately 340 acre-feet per year in the 1970s and 900 AFY between 2000 and 2014.”
In the same time, groundwater pumping by the Montecito Water District also increased, from about 100 acre-feet per year to about 310 acre-feet per year.
One acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover 1 acre with 1 foot deep of water — about the size of a football field — which is 325,851 gallons.
A recent Dudek study of groundwater pumping found that between 2011 and 2015, the water district pumped 421 acre-feet per year and private wells pumped an estimated 2,001 acre-feet out of the basin annually.
Private wells are used primarily for landscape irrigation, and also for small water systems and small-scale agriculture, according to the GSA draft plan.
The GSA has a well metering program, which is voluntary for private well owners, to get a better idea of how much water is pumped out of the local basin. The district also installed a grant-funded monitoring well in Lower Manning Park to gather information on the groundwater basin’s condition.
The Montecito Water District and other agencies pumped groundwater extensively during the drought when surface water from reservoirs was in short supply. It can take several years for groundwater basins to recover from that increased level of pumping,
With this winter’s rains, Santa Barbara County and many other regions of the state left drought status altogether.
Lake Cachuma filled up completely for the first time since 2011, and water agencies are expecting higher water deliveries from the State Water Project than the past few years.
