WORKSHOP: "Central Valley California Rural Water Infrastructure Development and Outreach Project"

National Water Research Institute, Fountain Valley CA

Investigators

Abstract

1536221 Mosher Central Valley California Rural Water Infrastructure Development and Outreach Project Within the United States, hundreds of thousands of families do not have reliable access to clean drinking water. This reality impacts the US economy and national security because the areas under the most stress tend to supply much of the nation's food, fiber, mineral, and energy resources. The objective of this project is to mitigate this problem by developing a methodology that will allow local communities to combine resources to overcome this scale issue and to address the maintenance and upgrade backlog of their systems by identifying potential public-private partnerships that will provide financial support. The effort will focus on the San Joaquin Valley in California for its test case, using stakeholder driven workshops to identify the local issues and develop the necessary communal relationships and support. This project will develop a new and unique approach for helping these rural communities through a combination of stakeholder driven activities and tradeoff analyses. The approach will form the foundation for bringing rural communities together to leverage common resources and increase their economic power, with the end goal of using their collective involvement to pursue private-public partnerships that will fund the necessary system and infrastructure improvements. While stakeholder driven processes, communal approaches, and tradeoff analyses have been used in the past, this effort will be the first to combine the three with the goal of simultaneously developing engineered and financial solutions for the region. The San Joaquin Valley is one of the fastest growing regions in California with an average growth rate from 2000-2010 of 21.6 % and a population of approximately 4 million people. The population is predominantly Hispanic (95.6) with a median income that is nearly half of the California median ($22,792 vs. $58,328 in 2012). In 2006, six counties in the San Joaquin Valley had the highest percentage of residents below the federal poverty line with approximately 49 % of the residents living in poverty. Less than 1 in 3 has a high school education or better. From 2008-2012, about three-quarters (73 %) of the San Joaquin Valley?s economic production is from agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, with transportation and warehousing (4 %), accommodation and food services (3 %), retail trade (3 %), manufacturing (3 %), utilities (2 %) and administrative support and waste management (2 %) making up the majority of the balance. Approximately 50 % of the population works in agriculture producing over 300 crops that represent approximately 13 % of the national agricultural production. The statistics above show that this project will provide broad impacts to a mostly Hispanic and impoverished community that lacks the educational background and technical expertise to tackle such a difficult problem. Through helping communities increase the reliability and quality of their local water supplies, this project may also contribute to local, regional, and national economies by increasing worker production as well as by reducing health costs associated with water quality ailments.