In the weekly newsletter sent out by the City of Santa Barbara on June 14, we are given a peek at how the water policy followed by the city over the past decade has worked out.
The city provides us with a chart showing that consumers of water in Santa Barbara pay substantially more for their water than do Goleta, Carpinteria or Montecito at all but the very least levels of consumption. Remarkably, huge estates in Montecito irrigate their grounds at 68 percent of the cost of urban homesteads in our city!
This Montecito luxury is ironically made possible because Santa Barbara is, as the city notes, selling water to Montecito at wholesale cost. We even, as I understand it, paid for the line to deliver the water to Montecito. This subsidy of the Montecito ratepayers was made necessary as a result of the extravagant price of the first and second desalination plant boondoggle.