Splitting the distance almost evenly between the crowded stucco hills of San Francisco and the coastal bluffs of Santa Cruz, the town of Pescadero sits quiet and well-farmed.
The only grocers are local. Every shop, every restaurant, every small business in town lines one, straight-shot street that takes you from the inn to the post office. There’s a Protestant church, an old lighthouse and a secondary school serving grades 6-12 that, just last December, finally won direct access to clean drinking water.
“It’s hard to believe that there’s a school district in one of the most wealthy counties in the nation that doesn’t have clean water,” said Amy Wooliever, superintendent of La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District (LHPUSD). “But I think once we made people aware of that, we got a lot of cooperation.”
PMHS relies on bottled water for drinking, receving shipments of about 76 five-gallon bottles biweekly.
Around 300 students attend Pescadero Middle/High School (PMHS). The community itself is largely farmworkers. According to San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller, the area also has a sizable undocumented population.
PMHS relies on an old agricultural well that predates the school itself. For more than 25 years, due to the poor taste of the well water and recurring nitrate contamination, the school has depended on biweekly shipments of bottled water for drinking and cooking.
[LEFT] The well system at PMHS tested positive for nitrates in 2015.
[RIGHT] PMHS’s current well house that provides non potable water for the school. The nitrate contamination within the well makes the water produced unsafe for consumption
Nitrate, a compound used in chemical fertilizers, is a common drinking water contaminant in agricultural areas. Ingesting high levels of nitrate is associated with various health hazards including the risk of specific cancers and birth defects.
In 2020, after an attempt to dig a new well for the school yielded inadequate water flow, the County of San Mateo proposed the County Service Area 11 Water Service (CSA-11) Extension and Pescadero Fire Station 59 Project. The project entails relocating Pescadero’s fire station to the PMHS property and extending the water system of Pescadero to serve the school and station.
Fire Station 59, currently serving Pescadero, is located near Butano Creek and faces frequent threats of flooding.
“Water is tightly regulated on the coast. That’s a remnant of regulatory law that is supposed to make it difficult for people to build new development,” Mueller said.
“The way that the county solved that was to put a new fire station next to the middle and high school. By putting the fire station there, they were able to obtain grant money from the state,” Mueller said.
Funding for the CSA-11 water service extension to the PMHS portion of the project comes from the California State Water Resources Control Board under Proposition 1.
The current fire station is over 50 years old and located on a floodplain, facing the threat of interior flooding annually. Seasonal flooding of Butano Creek, situated adjacent to the station, also denies fire personnel direct access to the Pescadero community.
After years of bureaucratic gridlock and community advocacy, the county is set to break ground on the project in the spring of 2025.
Rural communities in particular often face roadblocks in gaining equitable access to clean water sources. Navigating red tape and labor costs makes construction of pipelines to rural areas technically difficult, in addition to having to compete for funding against more populated municipalities.
“The government might say, ‘We can either give you a certain amount of money for your small school or we can invest the same thing in a highly populated city [school], and we would be helping hundreds more children for the same investment,’” said Brent Haddad, professor of environmental studies specializing in water policy and management at UC Santa Cruz. “That’s another problem when you do a cost-benefit analysis — the small communities almost always don’t look as good as the more populated areas.”
Many members of the community wondered why students in Pescadero lacked access to clean water for so long. To Rita Mancera, executive director of Puente de la Costa Sur, a non-profit organization serving the South Coast region of San Mateo County, the lack of such a precious resource demonstrates a clear equity issue.
“This is a district that is [mostly] Latino students. It makes me question if it has to do with the students not being a priority for our county, that the families are not a priority for the county,” Mancera said. “We’ve known about this issue for so long. It still makes us upset, but we’re almost numb to it.”
Actualizing the project has been a tedious process.
Stage one amended the Local Coastal Program (LCP) to expand the boundaries of CSA-11, allowing for the extension of water service to the school. Proposed amendments to the LCP undergo a lengthy approval process: First, through the Agricultural Advisory Committee, then the county’s Planning Commission, the county Board of Supervisors and finally the California Coastal Commission (CCC).
In December 2023, community members with children at the school attended the CCC hearing, sharing their experiences and advocating for approval, which the commission ultimately supported.
“After the [CCC] meeting, the room was just a roar of excitement,” Mancera said. “I don’t think the county would have done it alone. I feel that it was really important that they had the critical support of the community, that they were outspoken and outraged.”
After approving the LCP amendment, the San Mateo Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) approved the annexation of CSA-11 to extend water service.
Despite large community support, the project is not without controversy.
The San Mateo County Farm Bureau submitted a request on Oct. 18, 2024 to appeal the LAFCo decision, citing, among other details, that “The school property contains prime agricultural land that is currently being farmed.” LAFCo ultimately denied the appeal in late November, allowing the project to proceed.
Pescadero residents can expect clean water in their schools and a new fire station in the summer of 2027. The community widely views the project as a hard-fought success made possible by community organizing.
“We have a lot of resilience here. I think our people are resilient. I think our students are resilient,” superintendent Wooliever said. “We have great families and great kids, it’s worth fighting for.”
