In 2012, California passed AB 685, becoming the first state to recognize the human right to water. Despite this, as of 2024, over 900,000 California residents get water from water systems that fail to provide them with safe, clean drinking water.
In 2024, the California State Water Resources Control Board published data showing that 379 of the 457 failing water systems were small water systems with 3,000 or less service connections (often translating to households), mostly located in California's rural agricultural regions in the Central Coast or San Joaquin Valley. Most of these systems rely on groundwater, which may be contaminated with arsenic, nitrate, or 1,2,3-TCP (trichloropropane).
San Lucas is a small unincorporated rural community in the Salinas Valley with a population of 324. San Lucas has been on a 'do not drink' order for over 10 years from elevated levels of nitrate in their water supply. The community's wells are located on nearby farmland, where nitrate from crop fertilizer leeches into the groundwater that the well ultimately pulls from. Nitrate consumption has been linked to cancers and pregnancy complications, including "blue baby syndrome."
San Lucas residents are incredibly burdened by the lack of access to clean drinking water. The State provides households with 15 gallons of water per week, but for most families these 15 gallons do not meet their household's needs. Imagine if you are a family of five or six, having to allocate 15 gallons between your family for drinking, cooking, and sometimes even bathing.
Residents in San Lucas have complained of skin irritation even from bathing in the water and often choose to bath young children in bottled water, or rinse with bottled water, despite the California Department of Public Health saying that babies can be bathed in nitrate contaminated water. Most residents drive to King City (10 miles away) to buy bottled water to supplement the allocated bottled water, and still have to pay their water bill for unsafe water.
Access to safe drinking water is an ongoing problem. The Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience Program (SAFER) was established in 2019, allocating $130 million each year, to provide a funding source for operation and maintenance costs, consolidation projects, replacement water, and funding for administrators. Since 2019, SAFER has provided $700 million in grants for small, disadvantaged communities in California. While SAFER was originally set to end in 2030, in 2025 the California legislature extended the yearly allocation of funds to 2045.
San Lucas has spent years trying to figure out the solution to their problem. The community has received a little over half a million dollars in technical assistance funding from the SAFER program. This money has funded a study of solutions, with alternatives including an 8 mile pipeline to King City, two different well-head treatment systems, and building a new well.
In June of 2025, the San Lucas County Water District (the small company providing water to San Lucas) voted to pursue alternative four, build a new well. But building a new well comes with its own uncertainties.
As Paul Hamann has previously discussed on the blog, rural landowners of private domestic wells are facing the ongoing problem wells drying up due to over-pumping. Private domestic wells provide water to between 1.5 and 2.5 million California residents, but are not regulated by the state. If you own a private domestic well, you are responsible for testing for contaminants to ensure that it is safe to drink.
While any new well built by San Lucas would still be a part of a water system regulated by the state, they undoubtedly will face the same uncertainties of ensuring that their well does not run dry. Seemingly even more pressing, how can San Lucas ensure that their new well does not face the same fate as the current wells? Surrounded by agriculture, it seems like a tall task to find a location to drill a new well safe from nitrate contamination.
Whatever path ends up being taken, there is no doubt that these communities, especially San Lucas, need clean drinking water, and they needed it ten years ago. While the State Water Board may tout that 98% of California's have clean drinking water, we cannot choose to neglect 2% because of their location in rural areas.
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