A University of California Cooperative Extension survey found that community water systems uniformly benefit from consolidation.
Kristin Dobbin, a UCCE water justice policy and planning specialist, looked into how small rural communities – some with populations of a couple hundred people – are coping with the high cost of installing and maintaining water infrastructure.
Consolidation can connect water systems through building additional infrastructure, such as pipelines, or by administrative mergers between water managers. Dobbin found that two-thirds of her survey respondents pursued projects to improve water quality, with chemicals such as arsenic, nitrates and 1,2,3-trichloropropane often contaminating their supply.
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The major barrier for most projects is money and time; although the State Water Resources Control Board can provide funding, communities in Dobbin’s survey did not want to wait for state allocations. She did find that technical assistance through nonprofits and other community-based organizations helped expedite the grant writing process and project planning and construction.
Dobbin will follow up her survey by looking into consolidation’s effect on household water rates and seek out more systems to get a broader case study representation.
