Santa Barbara officials outline $113 million plan to replace Vic Trace Reservoir

Santa Barbara City Water Resources staff on March 20 described a preliminary plan to replace the aging Vic Trace Reservoir on the Mesa with two buried storage tanks, outline a multi-year environmental review and outreach program, and seek funding including state revolving loans and bonds.

At a Water Commission meeting, Kelly Bork, senior project engineer and acting supervising engineer for the Vic Trace replacement project, said the work would keep the system's existing 10,000,000-gallon capacity by installing two 5,000,000-gallon buried reservoirs within the current footprint. “Yes. We decided on two buried reservoirs, two 5,000,000-gallon reservoirs,” Bork said, describing that decision as driven by hydraulic and site constraints.

The project team told commissioners the Vic Trace site, between Cliff Drive and the neighborhood near La Cornia, is roughly 15 acres and currently stores finished drinking water that serves about 60,000 people — roughly 70% of the city's water customers — including downtown, the Mesa and the West Side. Bork said the existing reservoir, built in the 1950s, shows deterioration and presents seismic and slope-stability concerns under modern codes, motivating a full replacement rather than continued incremental repairs.

Why it matters: Bork and other staff emphasized the reservoir's central role in the distribution system and said the replacement aims to improve seismic resilience, water quality protection, security for on-site public-safety communications facilities…