Santa Rosa approves water supply assessment for The Woodlands at Shenate development
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Summary
Council approved a water supply assessment finding that existing and projected supplies meet the needs of The Woodlands at Shenate under most scenarios; staff noted a small shortfall in an extreme single-dry-year scenario and recommended standard demand-management measures and contingency plans.
The Santa Rosa City Council voted unanimously on Dec. 10 to approve a Water Supply Assessment (WSA) for The Woodlands at Shenate, a proposed rezoning and residential project on roughly 70 acres with a maximum theoretical buildout equivalent of about 660 single-family units.
Claire Nordli of the Water Department presented the WSA methodology, which uses residential equivalency factors and a baseline single-family annual use of about 65,000 gallons per year to translate project units into water demand. For the full project (660 residential equivalency factors) the projected new demand is approximately 136.5 acre-feet per year after accounting for about 7 acre-feet of existing demand at the site.
Under the WSA analysis required by Senate Bill 610, staff compared projected demand to supply across three scenarios. In a normal water year the city's combined supply (including Sonoma Water contractual entitlements, groundwater, and recycled water) — roughly 31,000 acre-feet in the presentation — easily exceeds demand. In a single-dry-year scenario based on the driest year on record, staff estimated a small shortfall (about 0.6%), which staff said could be mitigated through the city's water shortage contingency plan and demonstrated customer conservation seen during recent droughts. Under a multiple-dry-year average scenario, projected supply was sufficient.
Councilmembers asked about the vintage of some datasets used in the analysis (the Urban Water Management Plan from 2020) and whether changes such as the Potter Valley Project/river diversions were factored in. Nordli said the WSA uses the most recent required planning documents; staff acknowledged longer-term uncertainties (including changes in water operations or regional diversions) but said the WSA meets the legal standard and that the city would implement its water shortage contingency measures if needed.
Public comment raised concerns about uncertainty tied to the Potter Valley Dam decommissioning and downstream Russian River allocations; staff said those factors were considered in the assessment and reiterated that any future supply changes would be addressed under the city's ongoing planning and shortage-response frameworks.
The council approved the WSA by unanimous vote and directed staff to include the assessment as part of the record for the project's environmental review and land-use processing.