Eye on water


The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District board of directors voted to unanimously support AB 2050, a state bill that ensures communities served by non-compliant water treatment systems still receive safe and reliable potable water.

As of November 2017, the State Water Resources Control Board found that 329 water treatment systems impacting nearly 800,000 Californians are not up standard due to financial problems, unqualified management and poor technical resources and infrastructure.

Most of the non-compliant water systems lie in small, rural communities with fewer than 10,000 residents.

AB 2050 looks to establish the Small System Water Authority Act of 2018, which would provide a framework to merge the troubled entities into larger public water systems, thereby improving financial capacity, consolidating managerial functions and taking advantage of economies of scale.

Under the bill, the water resources board will be authorized to alert the non-compliant systems that they are in violation of public health standards and provide them the opportunity to develop a compliance plan.

If an approved plan is not forthcoming, the board will notify local agencies that the non-compliant district needs to be dissolved and possibly become part of a new water authority.

The new authority will be formed as a special district governed by a board of directors. It will have financing opportunities that are scaled to meet the district’s water quality obligations and allow it to build the infrastructure required to remove harmful water contamination.

“Water is a very complex issue in this state and this bill will help to cut through the layers of bureaucracy to address the fundamental need of clean water,” said Joe McDermott, the Las Virgenes director of resource conservation and public outreach.