The California State Water Resources Control Board has released its 2024 Drinking Water Needs Assessment.
In 2019 California passed Senate Bill 200 (SB200), which enabled the State Water Board to create the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience Drinking Water program (SAFER program). SB 200 established a set of tools, funding sources, and regulatory authorities that the State Water Board harnesses through the SAFER program to help struggling water systems sustainably and affordably provide safe drinking water.
The SAFER program is driven by collective responsibility: water systems, non-profit-organizations, governments, a community advisory board, and other interested parties work together to develop and implement solutions.
As of April 2024, nearly five years into the SAFER program, the State Water Board has distributed over $831 million in grants for drinking water projects in California’s disadvantaged communities—accelerating the pace of assistance so that over two-and-a-half times more funding has been delivered since 2019 than the $310 million distributed in the five years prior to the program.
In the same time period, 251 water systems serving 2 million people have come back into compliance with drinking water standards and 142 consolidations, benefiting approximately 100,000 people, have been completed.
The Needs Assessment identifies communities served by failing public water systems and predicts which public water systems, state small water systems, and domestic wells are at risk of failing.
It also estimates how much it will cost to achieve human right to water for failing and at-risk systems and the communities they serve, as well as estimates the potential five-year funding gap between estimated funding needs and state funding availability.
Lastly, the Needs Assessment identifies disadvantaged communities that may be facing affordability challenges, which may limit their ability to address existing and future drinking water challenges.
Key findings of the 2024 Needs Assessment results can be found below:
- 98% of California’s population receives water from systems that meet drinking water standards. 79% of water systems have continually been in compliance with drinking water standards since 2017.
- Approximately 56% of failing public water systems serve disadvantage communities and 67% serve majority communities of color.
- The Risk Assessment was able to predict risk of failure for 91% of water systems on the failing list in 2023.
- Estimated five-year funding needs for modeled long-term and interim solutions for failing and at-risk public water systems is approximately $6.6 billion and $4.9 billion for high-risk state small water systems and domestic wells.
- The State Water Board has a projected $3.5 billion in five-year funding availability, $2 billion for grants and $1.5 billion for loans. The estimated five-year funding gap is $5.5 billion for grant eligible needs. All estimated five-year loan eligible needs are met by projected available loan capacity.
- In the long-run, local communities and private well owners may need to cover $13.9 billion to achieve the human right to water.
- Small drinking water systems charge on average $32 more a month for the same volume of water compared to larger water systems.
- Approximately 94 (3%) of community water systems face high drinking water affordability burden and 311 (10%) may be experiencing medium affordability burden.
Other key finding include:
- California has 385 failing public water systems with a total population served of 913,500.
- California has 613 at-risk public water systems with a total population served of 1,535,200.
- California has 727 high-risk state small water systems.
- California has 143,663 high-risk domestic wells.
The results of the annual Needs Assessment are used by the State Water Board’s SAFER program and the SAFER Advisory Group to inform the prioritization of available state funding in the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund (SADWF) Fund Expenditure Plan (FEP).
