State Water Board's SAFER Program Helps Disadvantaged Communities Secure Safe Drinking Water
Over 98% of California's population is served by water systems that meet or exceed state and federal drinking water standards, thanks partly to the Safe Drinking Water Act. However, this still leaves about 750,000 people in California, many in small communities of color in unincorporated rural areas, who need reliable access to safe and affordable drinking water. The water and wastewater infrastructure in their communities suffer from decades of disinvestment brought about in some cases by discriminatory policies, like redlining, causing their water systems to fail due to a lack of maintenance, financial capacity, and know-how to stay ahead of emerging threats to water quality, like climate change and new contaminants of concern.
California was the first state to recognize the Human Right to Water in 2012 legislatively and has moved aggressively in recent years to create new funding sources, regulatory authorities, and broad technical assistance programs to help these communities. In 2019, Governor Newsom signed SB 200 establishing the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, which directs money collected from Cap-and-Trade auctions to help disadvantaged communities – those with a median household income of less than 80% of the state's average - secure an adequate and affordable supply of safe drinking water. To administer the fund, the State Water Board launched Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER), a set of tools, funding sources, and regulatory authorities designed to secure access to safe, affordable, and sustainable drinking water for California's disadvantaged communities. Five years into the SAFER program, underprivileged communities have received over $1 billion in grants for drinking water assistance and projects, and the number of Californians without access to safe drinking water has been reduced from 1.6 million to 750,000.
The State Water Board's annual data and analysis demonstrate that size is the key predictor of failure for public water systems; in 2024, 84% of the water systems determined to be at risk of failing were small systems with 3,000 connections or less. To reduce the number of small systems, SAFER staff promote consolidation, or merging two water systems, as a successful, long-term strategy to bring failing systems into compliance with drinking water standards. Consolidation expands the larger systems' customer base and solves smaller ones' technical and financial problems. The funding made available through the SAFER program reinforced a movement toward consolidation in the water sector that began in 2017 when the board received new regulatory authority to promote consolidations. Since then, 251 consolidations have been completed, and another 260 are currently at the funding, planning, or construction stage. Before 2017, only four consolidations were completed each year on average.
The towns of Lamont and El Adobe in Kern County are examples of communities that will benefit from one of these ongoing consolidations. In February 2023, the State Water Board provided the Lamont Public Utility District in Kern County a $25.4 million grant from the SAFER program to finance the consolidation of the water systems serving Lamont and the neighboring El Adobe Property Owners' Association, both failing due to elevated levels of arsenic. Once complete in 2025, the new, single, and upgraded system will supply safe and affordable water to over 20,000 residents.
"For us, this is monumental. We have never received assistance of this magnitude in our 80-year existence," said Scott Taylor, general manager of Lamont PUD. "The grant helps us make critical repairs and upgrades to our system to reliably provide safe and affordable drinking water for our customers and El Adobe. Lamont and El Adobe are severely disadvantaged communities; our customers are mostly agricultural workers. This never would have been possible without the board's funding and technical support through the SAFER program."
