Warner Unified schools haven’t had clean water for years

For 12 years San Diego County’s tiny, rural Warner Unified School District has had unsafe levels of arsenic in its drinking water.

The district is still struggling to secure a permanent clean water solution, and its leaders have been frustrated with what they described as bureaucratic delays in the process.

Now the district is at odds with the state, which is pushing for a clean water solution that some worry could not only raise construction risks but increase costs for the tiny school district and nearby residents.

In the meantime, the district has relied on bottled water to keep students and staff hydrated. It spends about $13,000 a year on bottled water, said Superintendent Andrea Sissons.

“These kids deserve water,” said school board trustee Gene Doxey. “Why don’t these kids have water?”

The struggle for Warner to get clean water is not unique, and underscores broader infrastructure and resources challenges that many rural school districts face.

Custodians Joe Melendez, front, and Edwin Martinez fill water jugs in classrooms at Warner Unified.

Warner Unified is a single-campus district that stretches from Palomar Mountain into the Anza-Borrego desert. Its elementary, middle and high school together enroll about 200 students.

The campus has just one operational water well, and it has been contaminated with high levels of arsenic since at least April 2012, state testing has shown. Last month the water in it contained 14 parts per billion of arsenic, more than the state’s allowable level of 10 parts per billion.

The arsenic is naturally occurring, state officials said, and it’s a not uncommon problem in water systems across the state. Arsenic naturally occurs in rocks and soil and can dissolve into groundwater.

Since 2015 the district has been providing only bottled water to students, Sissons said. There was a time when even the school kitchen had to use all bottled water, until it got a filtration system designed to siphon out arsenic.

On top of the cost of buying water, it takes up time resources from the district’s small staff, Sissons said. Every day, she said a custodian and a maintenance worker — the district has only two of each — spend an hour or two, each, changing the five-gallon jugs on the water coolers in every classroom.

The district can’t afford a new water solution on its own. It has no bond program that could fund one, and Sissons doesn’t know when the district’s last bond program was — if it ever had one.

And there is so little assessed property value within the rural district that the most bond money they could raise would be no more than $3 million for facilities projects, Sissons estimated. That would barely cover the cost that engineers had estimated to drill a new well.

So the district has asked the state for money, which comes with strings — the district has had to follow the state’s process for planning a new solution.

The process has felt bureaucratic and time-consuming to the district. It has been nine years since Warner Unified first applied for state help, and little was accomplished during the first several years, Sissons said.

“It felt like almost every month was like nothing happened — just long delay after delay, just a lot of the same conversation happening over and over,” she said.

Things progressed faster after the state recently gave Warner Unified a technical adviser to help them navigate the process.

But now, there’s another complication — the school district and the state don’t agree on what the water solution should be.

The state wants Warner Unified to consolidate with a small residential water system that serves the nearby Los Tules neighborhood. That would require building a connecting pipeline almost two miles long and cost $3.1 million, with another $40,100 in annual maintenance costs, a consulting engineering firm estimated.

But the district instead wants to build its own well on its campus, which would cost $2.6 million for construction and about $17,000 in annual maintenance.

By having its own well, the district would retain its autonomy and have more control over its water costs, Sissons said. If it joins the Los Tules water system, it will be at the mercy of Los Tules’ water board, should the board decide to raise water rates.

It’s the state’s policy to choose consolidation over any other water solution whenever consolidation is an option, state officials said. They said a larger water system like Los Tules has more technical, managerial and financial capacity to run a water system, and joining it would spare the school district time it would otherwise have to spend operating and maintaining a water system. The state said it has consolidated more than two dozen other school districts, mostly rural ones, with other water systems.

“The very acute benefit to the school is the school gets to get out of the water business,” said Chad Fisher, senior sanitary engineer for the state’s drinking water division. “Through experience on projects all over the state like this, we really see consolidations as the very best way to protect the health of the students and staff at this school.”

Warner’s consulting engineering firm wrote in a draft report that building a well on Warner’s campus would result in no new operational requirements for the district.

It also outlined potential risks of consolidating with Los Tules, including new risks of construction problems, higher water costs and the fact that one connection point failure in the pipeline could cause a water outage for the whole school district. The engineer noted that Los Tules itself has had water contamination issues in the past and that constructing the pipeline would take time because it requires a CalTrans easement.

Los Tules residents don’t want to consolidate with Warner Unified, either, said Dave Lowe, president of the Los Tules Mutual Water Company. He worries that adding Warner Unified would likely increase costs for the neighborhood’s more than 200 residents, many of them retirees. “It’s not fair to put that burden on the residents of Los Tules,” he said.

The state said it can force the consolidation if it chooses but has rarely had to do so, because parties usually agree that consolidation is the best choice.

“Typically, the incentives and benefits outweigh the burden and inspire motivation to embrace the consolidation as best for all concerned,” said Dimitri Stanich, spokesperson for the state Water Resources Control Board, in an email.

Sissons is concerned not only with how much money the proposed water solution will cost but also with how long it will take.

“Ultimately, we want clean water for the kids,” Sissons said. “We’re just looking for a quick resolution to this.”

The state Water Resources Control Board has been collecting comments about Warner’s draft engineering report before deciding which solution it will fund.

If it chooses consolidation with Los Tules, Sissons said the district may appeal the decision or consider ways to pay for its own well.