Water Supply Planning
The City's plan for a long-term, reliable water supply
For over a century, the City of Santa Cruz has been providing drinking water to residents and businesses in the water service area. The majority of the City’s water system was developed in the 1960s. Due to weather extremes caused by climate change, the current system can’t be counted on to reliably provide enough supply now or in the future. The Santa Cruz Water Department has identified a gap between the amount of water available and the amount needed.
Santa Cruz’s water supply is sourced 100% from local rainfall, with only enough storage for about one year’s worth of supply. No pipeline or canal connects to water sources beyond Santa Cruz County. The area is especially vulnerable to multi-year droughts, as well as extreme storms that deliver too much water, too fast and too muddy to treat for safe use by customers.
Growth is not driving the need to develop a supplemental water supply. Santa Cruz uses less water now than it did in the 1970s. Though the population has doubled since then, modern plumbing and appliances help customers use far less water now. Santa Cruz water customers maintain some of the lowest per capita use in the state at 44 gallons per person per day. New housing is almost entirely multi-family units that do not include yards that need watering. And the community has truly embraced a culture of conservation.
Despite low customer demand for water, Santa Cruz is vulnerable to water shortages during multiple dry years. This scenario is exacerbated when impacts of climate change are included in the analysis, with single-year supply deficits potentially ranging from 10-50%. Conserving water has always enabled Santa Cruz residents to endure droughts, but residents use so little water now that residential water conservation is no longer the solution during drought. The next drought will demand additional water savings from businesses, including those in the tourism sector, which is the city’s main economic engine.
The need for a supplemental water supply is also driven in part by Santa Cruz’s commitment to a healthy watershed, including support for fish populations. Leaving more water in the flowing sources for coho and steelhead results in less water available for water customers.
The City has investigated water supply augmentation strategies for decades. Ten years ago, the community-led Water Supply Advisory Committee (WSAC) conducted a process to identify which water supply solutions SCWD should consider. Those recommendations included a continued commitment to conservation, active groundwater recharge through Aquifer Storage and Recovery, and passive recharge via water transfers and exchanges with neighboring water agencies, as well as evaluation of recycled water and desalination.
The department has spent the last decade studying those solutions and making progress toward implementing some of them. The Water Commission, the City Council’s advisory body on water-related matters, receives routine updates on the City’s efforts to develop a supplemental water supply, also known as the Water Supply Augmentation Implementation Plan (WSAIP). The next step is to decide which of the WSAC’s water supply solutions will fully close Santa Cruz’s water supply gap.
Informational Videos
Former Water Director Rosemary Menard's August 2022 update on water supply planning in the video below.
"Weather whiplash,” “atmospheric rivers,” “severe drought”—if you live in California, this is probably not the first time you've seen these phrases. But why are these wild weather swings happening, and what do they mean for us? Check out this video to learn more!
Watch a short video to learn about the need to reinvest in the community's water system.
Online Reports
Reports related to Water Supply Planning are available on the Online Reports webpage.
Where does our water come from?
The Santa Cruz Water Department (SCWD) is proud to provide 100% locally sourced water to our customers. SCWD’s drinking water comes from protected, carefully managed local surface water and groundwater sources. Water is processed at drinking water treatment facilities.
Santa Cruz relies predominantly on surface water, including North Coast sources (Liddell Spring and Laguna, Majors, and Reggiardo creeks), the San Lorenzo River, and Loch Lomond Reservoir. The rest of the City’s supply comes from groundwater extracted from the Beltz Well system in the Santa Cruz Mid-County Groundwater Basin. The North Coast sources represent approximately 23% of the total water supply, the San Lorenzo River 56%, the Loch Lomond Reservoir 15%, and the Beltz Well system 5%. Typically, 90-95% of source water is processed at the Graham Hill Water Treatment Plant, with the remaining water processed at the Beltz and Beltz 12 water treatment plants.