The District will be closed on Monday, January 16, 2023 in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr Holiday. For water emergencies, call 805-684-2816. The District staff has on-call personnel that will respond to water emergencies.
The District will be closed on the following dates: December 26, 2022, December 30, 2022 and January 2, 2023. For water emergencies, call 805-684-2816. The District staff has on-call personnel that will respond to water emergencies.
The District currently has an open position for an Accounting Technician II. Click
here to be routed to the District's Employment web page for a description of the open position and information on how to apply.
The Carpinteria Valley Water District (CVWD) and Carpinteria Sanitary District (CSD) have partnered to develop an advanced water purification facility which will create a drought-resilient water supply for our service area. It is evident that the District’s existing water supply portfolio is extremely vulnerable during periods of prolonged drought. Lake Cachuma is below 32% of its capacity at the time of this writing and California water agencies received just 5% of our water allocations this year from the State Water Project (SWP). Equally low or no allocations are expected in the coming years from the SWP. Our existing water supplies do not provide enough water to meet our customer’s water demand in coming years and to date we have not met our District-wide conservation goals. The Carpinteria Valley Water District moved from a Stage 2 Drought Emergency to a Stage 3 Drought Emergency as of the November 9, 2022 Board Meeting, reducing the number of landscape watering days from 3 days per week to 2 days per week to help conserve additional water. Irrigating non-functional turf, turf that is solely ornamental and not regularly used for recreation, is still prohibited throughout California for commercial, industrial, and institutional (CII) water customers. We have had minimal precipitation and we must manage our water supplies under the assumption that this is the “new normal” until our local and State-wide weather conditions prove otherwise. The Carpinteria Advanced Purification Project (CAPP) will create a source of water that is not dependent on rain and will be a vital water supply when our surface water and imported water supplies become limited.
CAPP replenishes the groundwater basin with water that can be used for drinking. This process is known as indirect potable reuse or IPR. The project consists of taking water that has already been treated at the CSD Wastewater Treatment Plant, purifying it in a new advanced water purification facility, and transporting it through its own water system to be stored in the groundwater basin. An overview of this process is provided in Figure 1. This facility would create 1,000 acre-feet per year for the District, which makes up 25% of the annual water demand for our customers. Currently this water resource is treated and then released into the Pacific Ocean. We would be capturing this local water source and maximizing its use.
In addition to diversifying our water supply portfolio, CAPP will provide overall benefits to the Carpinteria Groundwater Basin (CGB) in helping to minimize the risk of seawater intrusion. CAPP will be instrumental in helping us to reach groundwater sustainability under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). Indirect potable reuse is safe, sustainable, and environmentally friendly.
Initially, CAPP was estimated to cost around $30 million dollars; however, inflation has impacted projected construction costs. The project is now estimated to cost around $40 million dollars at this time. Although this is very unfortunate, it is important to keep up the momentum and push the project forward to secure a new water supply for our community, especially with no end in sight for our current drought. Without rain, our current sources of water are not being replenished and this additional source of water is being released into the ocean every day. We have the methods, technology, plans, and site selected to make this project happen. Over the course of the next three years we plan to finalize CAPP’s design, secure the required permits, pursue funding opportunities and construct the project.
So far, the District has acquired a grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the amount of $9.5 million through their Title XVI Water Reclamation and Reuse program that provides funding for the planning, design, and construction of water recycling and reuse projects. Through the Clean Water State’s Revolving Fund (SRF) loan program, we were allocated an additional $10 million in grants for Recycled Water Projects. We are also hoping to receive $1.1 million through an Integrated Regional Water Management Planning (IRWMP) grant that was applied for this year. In October a grant became available to assist with meeting SGMA requirements. Since CAPP serves not only to create a new water supply but will also help our groundwater basin, the District plans to ask for around $15 million through SGMA funding. It is the goal of the District to keep pursuing grant opportunities in order to minimize the financial impact of constructing CAPP to its customers.
We have completed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirements for CAPP and the preliminary design and are moving into the final design and permitting phase. We plan to finalize this process within the next 18 months. Once construction begins, it is estimated to take another 18 months to build the facility, construct the conveyance pipeline, and drill the injection well. If all goes according to plan, the facility could be ready by January of 2026.
For more information on CAPP visit cvwd.net/capp/ and to stay up to date on the Carpinteria Groundwater Sustainability Agency and Groundwater Sustainability Plan development visit carpgsa.org. Both websites allow for you to sign up for e-mail updates to monitor project progress. We hope that you will continue to use water wisely. The District continues to offer rebates for residential and commercial customers for water conservation fixtures and appliances as well as rebates on WaterWise Landscape upgrades. If you are looking for a winter project, you can get some financial assistance with transforming your lawn and replacing it with native and low water use plants. E-mail conservation@cvwd.net for additional information. For District updates, please visit our website cvwd.net, follow us on twitter @CarpWater, or Carpinteria Valley Water District on Facebook and Nextdoor.
CVWD is projecting a potential 30% water supply shortage if drought continues! As a result, CVWD Board of Directors approved
Ordinance 22-1 declaring Stage 3 drought condition and new watering restrictions on November 9, 2022. For a summary of the Stage 3 water regulations/restrictions, click
here.
November 14, 2022, 4:00 p.m. Update: Water Service has been restored. Customers near the 1000 block of Cramer Rd and 4500 block of Carpinteria Ave may experience temporary water service interruption due to an emergency shut-down and service repair. The CVWD crew will make every effort to minimize the time the water is off. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.
The Carpinteria Valley Water District and Carpinteria Sanitary District are excited to take the next step in implementing the Carpinteria Advanced Purification Project (CAPP) with the release of a Request for Proposals (RFP) for Design and Construction Services for CAPP.
Click
here for more information
The District currently has an open position for a Water Utility Worker 1
or Water Utility Helper and Accountant. Click
here to be routed to the District's Employment web page for a description of the open position and information on how to apply.
As the drought lingers on it is important now, more than ever, to ensure that we are preventing water waste whenever possible. The District undertook an Automated Meter Infrastructure (AMI) Project starting in 2017, which consisted of replacing all water meters two inches and under. Water meters typically have a lifespan of 15-20 years and ours were in need of replacement to ensure they were registering and recording water consumption accurately. In addition to replacing water meters, encoder radio transmitters (ERTs), commonly referred to as “endpoints” in the AMI industry, were attached to each meter to collect water consumption data and report it to our District office.
This new infrastructure has completely transformed the way that our agency interacts with metered water data and has improved our ability to respond to customer leaks. You may remember in the past we had meter readers in orange vests driving around town on scooters at the end of each month physically lifting water meter lids and reading the meter’s screen to allow us to complete our monthly billing. When this was our method of obtaining reads, we only received one data point every 30 days, unless we were called out to the meter to get an ending read if someone was moving out. This meant that if you had a toilet leak unbeknownst to you running 2 gallons per minute every minute that month, you would have used 86,400 extra gallons of water over 30 days that you might not know about until you received your water bill. Your water bill would have an additional 115 units of water tacked on to it resulting in hundreds of extra dollars owed. Our old infrastructure and system did not allow for staff or customers to see this information until it was far too late.
Now, our new equipment and its associated technology provide a tool for District staff and customers to catch these unexpected and wasteful continuous flows of water. Continuous flow alerts are sent when the meter reports that water has been flowing for 24 hours straight without a 15-minute period of no flow. Our conservation staff and field customer service representative help to monitor leak alerts using an online portal that pulls in water meter data 4 times each weekday. We hang tags and call customers if we are alerted of large continuous flow alerts. The great news is that this tool is not just available to us, but customers can quickly and easily set up an account at
https://eyeonwater.com/signup to view the same information for their account. Customers can also set up leak alerts to be sent to their e-mail or cell phone after the system registers 24 hours of continuous flow.
The District has already used this tool to save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and notify customers of excessive, atypical water consumption. One customer forgot to turn off a garden hose when watering a tree in their backyard and accidentally used 616 gallons per hour (over 10 gallons per minute) for approximately 43 hours, resulting in over 27,000 gallons of water used. This added an additional 37 units and over $100 to their monthly bill. Another customer had a large leak in their backyard’s irrigation system at their vacation property. Water was running continuously at around 2,292 gallons per hour (38.2 gallons per minute) and they used over 97,000 gallons over the course of 42 hours. Our field staff responded to the leak alert to find a completely flooded backyard and was able to shut the meter off on the customer side until repairs could be made and the owners could assess the damage. This equated to over 120 units of water accidentally being used and several hundred dollars added to their monthly bill. Imagine if a leak was inside their home and went undetected for an extended period. Unrepaired leaks like this have the potential to cause thousands of dollars of water damage to businesses and homes if no one is looking for a leak. Instances like this demonstrate that creating an account is not only important for saving water and monitoring your use, but also can be important for preventing costly damage.
We are excited to see many of our customers creating their own EyeOnWater accounts and setting up leak alerts so that they can be aware of abnormal water use and act quickly to prevent water waste. Creating an account is easy to do and only requires that you have your water account number found on your water bill. If you need assistance with creating an account at
https://eyeonwater.com/signup, setting up alerts, or understanding the consumption data it displays you can call the office at 805-684-2816 or e-mail
eyeonwaterinfo@cvwd.net.
In addition to providing the EyeOnWater tool, the District continues to offer rebates for residential and commercial customers for water conservation fixtures and appliances as well as rebates on WaterWise Landscape upgrades. If you are looking for a fall project, you can get some financial assistance with transforming your lawn and replacing it with native and low water use plants. E-mail
conservation@cvwd.net for additional information. For District updates, please visit our website cvwd.net, follow us on twitter @CarpWater, or Carpinteria Valley Water District on Facebook and Nextdoor.
