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Water resources staff present 2024 Consumer Confidence Report and Public Health Goals review; city says drinking water meets regulatory limits
Summary
Water Resources staff reviewed the city’s 2024 Consumer Confidence Report and the triennial Public Health Goals report, concluding Santa Barbara’s drinking water meets all maximum contaminant levels and noting a handful of parameters above non-enforceable public health goals.
City of Santa Barbara Water Resources staff presented the 2024 Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) and the related Public Health Goals (PHG) report to the Water Commission on July 17, describing lab operations, testing volume, and key results from calendar year 2024.
Galen Fair, the city’s Water Quality Superintendent, said the CCR — a Division of Drinking Water regulatory requirement covering calendar year 2024 — was mailed to customers by the July 1 deadline. Fair said the report lists only detected parameters and compares measured results to regulatory benchmarks such as maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) and public health goals established by CalEPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
Fair summarized laboratory capacity and 2024 testing work: the Water Resources Laboratory is staffed 7.5 full-time equivalents (with two hourlies and two additional full-time hires expected this year), collected about 12,000 samples, ran roughly 36,000 analyses and about 11,000 quality-control tests in 2024. He said about 97% of tests were performed in-house and the lab is ELAP-certified for 47 test methods under the new environmental laboratory accreditation rules.
On water-quality findings, Fair said the city’s drinking water met all MCLs in 2024 and reiterated: "The city's drinking water meets and exceeds all regulatory limits below the MCLs. The city water is safe to drink." He noted a small number of parameters exceeded non-enforceable public health goals, specifically bromate (a disinfection byproduct at the Cater treatment plant where ozone is used), lead and copper (from plumbing corrosion detected via household sampling under the lead-and-copper rule), and certain naturally occurring radiologicals detected in desalinated water. Fair said removing bromate or radiologicals to PHG levels would require reverse osmosis at treatment plants and that the estimated household cost for removing bromate to PHG via RO at Cater would be about $3,400 per year per household; for lead, Fair said the city already uses corrosion-control optimization, so additional cost was listed as negligible.
Fair also described the federal unregulated contaminant monitoring rule (UCMR) rounds and how only detected contaminants must be reported in the CCR. He said UCMR-5 testing found no PFAS detections that required reporting on the CCR chart for 2024.
Commissioners praised the laboratory’s work and its ELAP certification. There was no public comment and no commission vote required on the CCR or PHG report.
