The five-year-old moratorium on new water hookups in the Goleta Valley will likely continue through 2020, even though the drought emergency is over, authorities say.
On the heels of a very wet winter, the Goleta Water District is receiving its normal deliveries from Lake Cachuma, a key condition for lifting the moratorium on new service under the SAFE Water Supplies Ordinance of 1991. But district officials say they are unable to fulfill a second condition that requires injecting a large supply of Cachuma water into the valley’s depleted groundwater basins.
On October 8, the Goleta Water District board will vote on a resolution extending the moratorium through 2020. It has been in effect since September 2014, when Cachuma was two-thirds empty and all the South Coast water agencies agreed to a 55 percent cut in their reservoir allocations.