Teviston

shortages when the community’s only well collapsed in November 2017. Like many rural communities in the Central Valley, Teviston did not have a working back-up well.

Four years later, it still doesn’t.

In 2017, Teviston received state funding for emergency response and partnered with nearby Pixley for water. One solution that Galaviz suggests includes incorporating Teviston with Pixley to access their water system.

There is a bill making its way through the Legislature — Senate Bill 403 — which would allow the State Water Board to consolidate communities that risk losing access to clean and safe drinking water, especially disadvantaged communities that rely on at-risk wells.

For now, the agency is in the process of building a new, modern well for Teviston, Well 4, which Galaviz estimates will be completed by 2022 or 2023. “We need the State Water Board to expedite our funding for Well 4,” he said during the conference.

Thousands of wells in the San Joaquin Valley are at risk of drying up this summer, which will disproportionately impact Latino residents that are more likely to rely on private wells. Furthermore, a recent state drought analysis reported that low-income Latinos were hit the hardest by the last drought, especially in rural farmworker communities.

“Rural Californians of the Central Valley face inequities when it comes to water, energy, and health,” said Hurtado after a virtual conference call.

Scott Taylor, general manager of the Lamont Public Utility District, said his Kern County community of 20,000 people, mostly Latino farmworkers, has seven wells. Five of them are contaminated with the cancer-causing carcinogen 123-trichloropropane (TCP), and one is nonfunctional. Taylor said he needs better infrastructure for his aging wells to serve the “severely disadvantaged residents” of Lamont.

State funding is available to improve drinking water infrastructure. The State Water Resources Control Board has up to $130 million to use each year until 2030 to “address funding gaps and provide solutions to water systems, especially those serving disadvantaged communities,” through the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) program, according to the board’s website.

“State partner agencies, like the State Water Resources Control Board, stand ready to assist local agencies and counties as they address these emergencies while also working towards long-term solutions for communities like Teviston through its existing assistance programs,” said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the Division of Drinking Water at the board, in an email statement to The Bee.

Galaviz and Taylor both said they encountered bureaucratic delays when working with the State Water Board. “The truth is that not only is the water not flowing, but neither is the funding,” Taylor said.

In May, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed $5.1 billion for drought preparedness,

infrastructure, and response. $1.3 billion of this funding would be for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, especially for small and lowincome communities. According to Orellana, the governor’s proposed investments are “a huge step forward to addressing the more than $4 billion needed over the next

five years alone to tackle failing and at-risk water systems across California.”

For rural Central Valley residents and water districts, the money can’t come soon enough.

“We know how difficult it is in the Central Valley to be without water, to have to deal with 100-plus degrees, and many of these families also having to deal with power outages and swamp coolers,” Hurtado said. “Sometimes it feels like we don’t get listened to; we don’t get heard.”

This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.