Council votes in favor of SB 623
Bill would ensure affordable drinking water
The Porterville City Council voted Tuesday in support of Senate Bill 623, which would establish the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund to ensure all Californians have access to safe and affordable drinking water.
The bill would also, among other things, require the Water Resources Control Board to expend money from the fund for grants, loans, contracts or services to assist those without access to safe and affordable drinking water, City Manager John Lollis said in a staff report.
Mayor Milt Stowe said in a letter of support to state Sen. Bill Monning, who authored the bill, that the new Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund would be authorized to provide both interim drinking water supplies and fund longerterm drinking water solutions, including operation and maintenance costs for lowincome communities that need drinking water treatment. The fund, Stowe said, may also be used to finance a statewide low-income drinking water rate affordability program and would be administered by the Office of Sustainable Water Solutions at the State Water Board.
“Safe and affordable drinking water is a fundamental human right enshrined in California law, but one that is still not realized for too many Californians,” Stowe said in the letter. “Critical drinking water needs still remain unresolved, leaving families and communities across the state without safe and affordable drinking water.”
He continued, “In the sixth largest economy in the world, we can and should ensure that all Californians have access to this most basic of human needs — safe and affordable drinking water.”
Ryan Jensen, with the Community Water Center, said at the council meeting that access to safe drinking water is a challenge faced by far too many people in the state and believes that every city should vote in favor of SB 623 to assist those who could really use the help.
“There are over 300 communities and a million residents in the state of California that lack access to this basic human right, that is far more than the population in Flint, Mich.,” Jensen said, adding that, “More than half of those 300 communities are located right here in the San Joaquin Valley.”
Jensen said even though there is funding available from the state for capital costs for drinking water solutions, when it comes to ongoing operation and maintenance costs, he said there is no funding mechanism to subsidize those costs at the local level, which he said means that the cost of treatment is borne by local ratepayers. That is why, Jensen said, many communities in the San Joaquin Valley are hit with high water rates, which, inevitably, impacts access to the basic human right.
The funding for SB 623, Jensen said, would initially be prioritized to the communities in greatest need that currently do not have access to safe drinking water, which he said would include many communities in the Central Valley. Over the longer term, Jensen said, these resources may be made available for other solutions, including domestic well owners and other local priorities.
“Specific details are still being worked out, but it is critical for our Valley voices to be heard and our Valley leadership to be speaking up because resources, far too often, bypass the Central Valley,” Jensen said. “They’re [resources] invested in every portion of the state except the San Joaquin Valley so this is an opportunity to bring much-needed resources to communities here in the Valley.”
Virginia Gurrola, former city mayor and council member, said she is in favor of the bill because she believes the city needs the money in order to be able to have a fund that is based on the use and is operational for water.
“We know what we had to go through with East Porterville, we know how much work it took to try and get those funds together and there are still many communities that are without clean water,” Gurrola said. “This [SB 623] would at least start us having a fund that is available so that we can start getting some of these communities into some kind of water system.”