“I think it’s from the nitrate,” Chavez says.
According to a 2012 report from UC Davis, in 96 percent of cases where nitrate leaches into groundwater supplies, agricultural operations are at fault.
This is almost certainly how the Chavez family’s well became contaminated.
“It’s shameful,” says Jonathan Nelson, the policy director for the Community Water Center, an organization that has been advocating for people without safe drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley for many years.
Jerry Brown declared he was “committed to working with the Legislature and stakeholders” to bring clean, safe, affordable water to all Californians, and he stated much the same thing in this year’s budget address, delivered in January.
Here, the wells that supplied 750 people ran dry during the drought.
Chavez says he has asked to be connected to the same pipe network.
The fund would be created mostly by a 95-cent-per-month addition to household water bills statewide, with 20 percent – $30 million – proposed to come from a tax imposed on agricultural fertilizers that contain nitrogen.
Tuck says drawing the needed money from the general fund, instead of taxing ratepayers, would be a more appropriate way to create and maintain the drinking water fund.
Nelson, at the Community Water Center, calls the stance taken by the Association of California Water Agencies “the shame of California.” “We have some of the wealthiest water agencies in the state worried about a fee of less than a dollar a month that would help bring clean water to communities of low-income people,” Nelson says.