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A person holding a “Justicia para East Orosi” sign. Credit: Sandra Tsang
In Part 1 of our series on water in the Central Valley of California we visited a town called East Orosi, which has been fighting for clean water for over 20 years. This week we turn our attention to their sewage system, which is also falling apart. Why has it been so difficult for East Orosi to get clean drinking water and fix its sewage problems?
To answer that question we take a look at the entities that run things like sewage and water in unincorporated towns all across California. They’re called Community Utility Districts. Community Utility Districts are often one of the only forms of self governance in unincorporated towns. But they’re staffed by volunteers, they’re underfunded, and they’re trying to share a vital resource, water, which is also slowly disappearing in the San Joaquin Valley.
We talk about the problems with Community Utility Districts and ways to save them.
Featuring: Episode Credits: Voice Overs
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Making Contact Button,
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Salima Hamirani: I’m Salima Hamirani, Welcome to Making Contact.
Berta Diaz Ochoa: Bueno, nosotros aquí esta agua que está aquí, pues se mira muy cristalina como la puedes mirar, pero esta agua está llena de nitratos.
well, here, this water here. So it looks really clear, as you can see, but this water is full of nitrates
Salima Hamirani: Today is part 2 of our series on safe drinking water in California. In the first show we visited a small town in California’s Central Valley called East Orosi where the residents have been living without clean water for over twenty years.
Berta Diaz Ochoa: nosotros nos enteramos. Ah, desde el 2000. Desde el pero dicen que ya había otro tiempo más atrás que el agua nos servía. no, nunca nos comunicó que el agua no servía hasta que empezaron a abortar a perder sus bebés. Las señoras que estaban embarazadas aquí
We found out in the year 2000, since 200. But they say that it’s been a while already that the water was polluted. They didn’t tell us that the water was communicated until the women who were pregnant here started having miscarriages
Salima Hamirani: But residents in East Orosi aren’t just struggling with their water. They’re also having problems with the sewage. The system sometimes fails and then septic water backs up through the house.
Berta Diaz Ochoa: Como en el baño, en el baño, en la cocina, en el toiler todo y huele.
In the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the toilet, all of it. And it smells.
Salima Hamirani:In the last episode we talked about a possible solution to East Orosi’s water problem. State funding through a program called SAFER wants to help build new infrastructure and combine East Orosi’s water system with its neighbor’s through a state ordered process called a consolidation
Janaki Anagha: Yeah, it is moving along, but at a snail’s pace, and we at this time anticipate having the construction complete. hopefully at the end of 2026.
Salima Hamirani: But, the consolidation was ordered in 2019. Why is it taking so long? And what’s going on with East Orosi’s sewage system? Well, the solutions to both the sewage and water problems are being hindered because of resistance from the local entities that run the utilities in rural towns across California. They’re called Community Utility Districts. And they’re the topic of today’s show.
Why are they such a huge barrier to providing access to basic services when they’re supposed to advocate for their communities?
Salima Hamirani: Stay tuned, all that and more, coming up.
Part 1
Berta Diaz Ochoa: Ah, bueno, nosotros tenemos que estar para aquí. No, no se mira,
Salima Hamirani: In our last episode we visited Berta Diaz Ochoa, a long term resident of East Orosi who’d been struggling to access clean water. When she took me around her house that day, she didn’t just show me her drinking water. She also showed me the septic system in her yard.
Berta Diaz Ochoa: aquí en esta área de aquí está el pozo de la fo ascética. Nosotros tenemos que abrir desde aquí hasta acá.
Here in this area is the septic tank. We have to open it from here up to there.
Salima Hamirani: East Orosi’s sanitation system was built back in the late 70’s so it’s decades old. Pipes carry waste out of the house and into a septic tank. Sometimes several houses share a tank. Then that waste moves through pipes through town and to a treatment plant in Cutler, a neighboring community. The entire system requires a lot of maintenance and there are many points where it is prone to failure
Berta Diaz Ochoa: Está bajo de la tierra, está bajo de la tierra, nuestros cada vez que vienen a limpiar, nosotros tenemos que abrir. Tenemos que escarbar cada vez que se nos llena la fosa
Its underground. And every time they come to clean it we have to open it. We have to ? everytime the septic tank is full.
Salima Hamirani: The tanks for each house have to be maintained. Which is a service the residents pay for.
Berta Diaz Ochoa: el año pasado. La limpiamos. No se nos ha tapado ahorita.
Last year we cleaned it. …?
Salima Hamirani: And if its not cleaned frequently….
Berta Diaz Ochoa: cuando se está llena, se nos regresa al agua, pa dentro de la casa, las aguas negras. Como en el baño, en el baño, en la cocina, en el toiler todo y huele.
When its full, the water backs up, into the house, the sewage water. Into the bathroom. Into the kitchen, into the toilet. Everywhere. And it stinks.
Salima Hamirani: The pipes and pumps that draw the sewage through the town and into Cutler also need maintenance. In April of 2024, one of the wastewater pumps in town stopped working, and waste began backing up into several homes and spilled out into their yards. Those residents were unable to bathe or use the bathroom for several days. It was just the latest in what the residents felt was a humiliating and overwhelming living situation.
The entire system has to be rebuilt and modernized. But that’s not the only reason they’re struggling. Here’s Janaki Anagha, the director of advocacy at an organization called Community Water Center, which helps small communities access safe drinking water through organizing, litigation and policy work
Janaki Anagha: We hear dozens of residents come and tell us they’ve never had their septic tank pumped. Even despite calling and trying to get through that they have had to do it themselves and pay There have also been several instances where the infrastructure has failed due to poor operation, maintenance and sewage has backed up into people’s homes into, their bathtubs and their sinks and, into their backyards.
Salima Hamirani: Their monthly bill is supposed to cover the cost of maintenance. That fee is paid to the East Orosi Community Services District. Sometimes the residents will refer to it as “the board” or the “water board.” And every unincorporated town has a Community Utility District, or board.
Janaki Anagha: in many of these small towns, there is either what’s called a community service district or a public utility district in lieu of a city council, because they’re not cities.
Salima Hamirani: If you live in a city, you rarely have to think about the infrastructure that surrounds your daily life. But if you live in what’s called an “unincorporated area,” basic services are often much more vulnerable.
About 18% of California’s population lives in unincorporated areas – which are small communities without an official central government. Some extremely wealthy towns are unincorporated by choice but most unincorporated areas are poor and rural. In the past some were temporary camps for migrant workers from the Dust Bowl, from the South, or farm workers from Latin America. These areas were never officially made into cities.
In a formal municipality, a city government helps run services like trash or street cleaning. Or water. But that doesn’t exist in unincorporated areas.
Janaki Anagha: So they have these boards made up of five people typically that Operate these basic services for, for the residents.
Salima Hamirani: And these usually aren’t paid positions,
Janaki Anagha: these are volunteer positions to be on these boards, there is very little qualification required to be a board member.
Salima Hamirani: There are some paid positions – usually the people who handle billing, for example, or engineers. But everyone else is a volunteer.
Utility districts are a lifeline for small towns – they’re the entities that maintain infrastructure, write grants for new projects, and make sure the bills get paid on time. But East Orosi residents argue that the inefficiency of their board has prevented them from fixing their sewage problem. And to understand what’s going on with the board, I went to talk to one of its members. Carlos Sanchez.
Part 2
Carlos Sanchez: So this is, this is my favorite tree. If I was going to knock down all the plants, that would stay. But I love plants. It’s just a tree.
Salima Hamirani: You’re listening to Carlos Sanchez, he’s on the board of the East Orosi Community Service district. Before we sat down to talk he wanted to show me his back yard, full of trees and birds
Carlos Sanchez: My collection of begonias. Here. More here. More here. More here. Wow, look at this backyard. And this is, I’m working on fixing this little by little. I got a lot of work to do.
Salima Hamirani: Carlos loves his house, which he inherited from his mother. But its been challenging for him since he returned to his hometown.
Carlos Sanchez: So, when I moved here, it was hard. It was hard. I had lived here when I was a kid, but I moved away when I was very young and I never came back. But my mom got sick and I came to take care of her and I just stayed
Moving here has really impacted my health though. I Moved here and My health just went down the hill.
Salima Hamirani: Carlos’s mother was one of the first organizers in the area. She began fighting for clean water when the town first realized their water was contaminated with nitrates.
Carlos Sanchez: This has been going on for 20 years. We’ve been fighting this. My parent, my mother started this. 20 over like 20 years ago
Salima Hamirani: Back then when Carlos was younger and living in San Francisco he thought, well, they’ll get it fixed, the government wouldn’t let people live without clean drinking water. right? But then his mother died before East Orosi’s water problem was resolved.
Carlos Sanchez: Then the whole narrative changes and you have a different perspective on how the government works and how politics work and how fucked up shit is because let’s not kid ourselves. If LA or any community that have a lot of money, rich white, rich communities would be in our situation. Do you honestly think that they, we’d be fighting for this for 20 years.Hell no.
Salima Hamirani: Because of his experience, Carlos chose to follow in his mother’s footsteps and try to do something to change East Orosi for the better. In 2022, he decided to join the Community Utility District as a board member. One of the reasons he joined was because the local community said they’d been having issues with the board, and that it was preventing them from fixing their water and sewage problems.
Carlos Sanchez: I just started in October. and I said, well, you know what? Let me, let me see if. Maybe with a new board member, things can change and I can make and we can fix the problem
Salima Hamirani: What kind of issues is the community having with their local utility district? One of the issues is that they can’t seem to reach quorum.
Kayla Vander Schuur: the CSD has had a huge difficulty in gaining and retaining board members
Salima Hamirani: That’s Kayla Vander Schuur, she’s the Community Development Specialist for an organization called Self Help Enterprises. They’ve been helping deliver water bottles to East Orosi, but they also work throughout the Central valley helping utility districts write grants, and access funding for infrastructure.
Kayla Vander Schuur: They need at least three in order to hold their board meetings and they need to hold board meetings and in order to improve invoices, pay their employees. get, get work done, really. Um, they’ll get four board members and then three people quit, and then they get two more board members and then someone quits. So they keep yo yoing between being an effective board, really.
Salima Hamirani: Part of the reason it’s so difficult to maintain a quorum on the board has to do with the demographics of East Orosi, and the requirements for joining a Community Utility District.
Kayla Vander Schuur: you need to be a citizen. Um, and we see a lot of people in the community don’t have their citizenship, so they can’t be elected to this position.
Um, while you don’t need to speak English to be on the board at all, that is kind of a commonly held idea in a lot of communities. So if someone is monolingual, they only speak Spanish. They don’t feel comfortable working in a, a government type setting where everything tends to be English as a default. A lot of things like that.
Salima Hamirani: These setbacks are already huge for East Orosi, where most people are immigrants and spanish speaking. But, according to residents there’s another problem they’re having with the board. Here’s Carlos –
Carlos Sanchez: It’s a secretary. Um, she threatens people , and then there’s a lot of issues with finances. A lot of the people in the community here have, um, say that they’ve been robbed by the board.
Salima Hamirani: Many of the locals I talked to said that they would receive bills from the secretary that didn’t make any sense. They allege that when they’ve asked for clarity or tried to negotiate with the secretary she’s threatened to call immigration on them.
The board secretary is Lucy Rodriguez. I reached out to her via email and phone for a comment but I didn’t hear back. I also stopped by her office – which is a small trailer in East Orosi but it was closed. That’s also part of the problem. East Orosi doesn’t really have any automated systems.
Janaki Anagha: There’s no way to pay your bill over the phone or online. It has to be done in person and it has to be done between the hours of two and four PM on a Tuesday. That’s it.
Salima Hamirani: That’s Janaki Anagha, again from the Community Water Center, Her organization has fielded complaints about the secretary for years.
Janaki Anagha: We get at least a dozen calls every month to our office talking about the bill collection staff there who does not provide receipts, does not provide proper accounting
Salima Hamirani: Janaki showed me pictures of bills that were on small pieces of paper, the dates scratched out and written over. There’s no metered readings or history on the bills. Just a total. So if you’re overcharged you can’t tell why from the receipt. In order to help East Orosi residents make sense of their sewage fees, Janaki crafted a disclosure form asking to review the billing history of a particular customer.
Janaki Anagha: and what comes back to me after four or five months of waiting is, A completely out of order history that will take me back to, you know, maybe to 2020, but it’s all out of order.
Salima Hamirani: She eventually started going into the trailer herself to review the billing, trying to make sense of it. She shared a video with me of one of those visits, watching as the secretary fills out the residents bills on carbon copy paper.
Janaki also sent a formal complaint on behalf of Community Water Center and East Orosi to the former legal counsel for the water board, David Yanez. Among the list of complaints she alleged that one resident was asked to pay ” 400% of what was originally billed without a written rationale for the increase.” She argued that the in person once a week payment system was a strain on people with fixed work schedules, and that they felt as if they were facing unnecessary intimidation everytime they tried to pay their bills.
Janaki Anagha: And again, this is a community of primarily farm workers, a lot of undocumented people. And this is the reality that people here face for. For years on end, So not only is it, as one resident describes it, just a psychological. A horror to go pay your bill and to be strong armed into paying something that you know you don’t owe. Um, and under threat of some sort of law enforcement. But, they’re not receiving services that they’re paying
Salima Hamirani: For Carlos, who joined the board to continue the legacy of his mother, it’s also starting to feel demoralizing. Though he’d been trying to advocate for the community he felt like he wasn’t able to gain much traction trying to hold Lucy accountable.
Carlos Sanchez: I’ve been thinking about it, whether it’s even worth me continuing, but at the same time, I made a promise to my mom that I would see this through and maybe this is the only reason why I’m doing it I don’t, I don’t want to give up
Salima Hamirani: Carlo’s experience highlights how difficult it can be to hold members of a community utility district accountable. There is no overseeing body that makes sure community utility districts are running effectively. And the board itself has to vote on whether to dismiss a member. That lack of oversight can mean residents hit a wall when trying to fight for change.
Scene 3
Maricela Mares-Alatorre: Quién necesita español, dánsele la mano.
Who needs spanish? Raise your hand.
Salima Hamirani: On a very hot September day in 2023, the residents of East Orosi packed into a church for a meeting – joined by a stray dog who’d wandered in.
Maricela Mares-Alatorre: Y quién necesita inglés? Y quién necesita perro? Yo también necesito que me traduzcan.
And who needs english? Who needs dog? I also need you all to translate for me!
Salima Hamirani: The voice you heard is Maricela Mares-Alatorre, she’s the Community Solutions Advocate for Community Water Center.
Maricela Mares-Alatorre: Um, por favor, digan su nombre. So we’re gonna, uh, we’re gonna pass it on to you. Um, please say your name, and what community you’re from, if you’re not from Easter Rosie
Salima Hamirani: They’re meeting to debrief a protest they held on August 31 2023, after months of trying to negotiate with the East Orosi Community Utilities District.
Maricela Mares-Alatorre: how many of you were here for the action on August 31st. Um, so some people raised their hands. Um, y queremos saber qué, qué sienten. So we want to know how you feel about that action.
Janaki Anagha: residents, uh, collected over 148 petition signatures for the removal of this billing staff, by the end of September,
Salima Hamirani: That’s about 35% of the total population of East Orosi asking for the removal of Lucy Rodriguez. The protest was back in 2023. As of the time of publishing this piece, there’s been no action from the board.In fact, they haven’t met since then, because they don’t have enough members to hold a meeting. Meanwhile the community continues to try and find a solution.
Music.
Salima Hamirani: The staff at Community Water Center now accompanies the residents every month when they pay their bills in person so that they can monitor the amounts and make sure there’s no harassment. But in the long run, East Orosi would love to see its sewer system replaced and combined with Orosi’s. Which is already supposed to take over their water system and billing, In fact Community Water Center recently introduced legislation that would allow california to consolidate sewage infrastructure, the same way they already do for water systems. If they could get all of East Orosi’s services just absorbed into a bigger more efficient one, the Utility District in East Orosi wouldn’t have to exist at all.
Which takes us back to the water problem, and why that’s being hindered by local utility districts…. as well. But this time, the issue lies with their neighbor – Orosi’s Utility District. Stay tuned, that’s right after the break.
BREAK
Amy Gastelum: We’re just jumping in to remind you that you’re listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s episode and want to know more visit us online at radioproject.org. And now, back to the show.
PART 3.
Salima Hamirani: Welcome back to Making Contact. Before the break we learned how East Orosi’s own Community Utilities District is hindering its ability to fix its sewage problem. For the end of the show we’re going to look at how the utility district of the neighboring town, Orosi, is preventing East Orosi from accessing clean water.
So, sewage and water are both run by a town’s utility district. In this case, East Orosi Community Utility District is in charge. As we’ve learned however, not only are the septic and drinking water systems in town extremely old and collapsing, the town’s utility district is dysfunctional and unable to meet. However, an apparent solution to the water issue in East Orosi DOES exist.
That’s because the state has specific funding available to rebuild failing water systems across california. It doesn’t have that kind of money for sewage. At least not yet. It also has laws in place that allows the state to combine neighboring water systems. It doesn’t have a similar law for sewage.
Using the water specific laws and funding the state of California asked East Orosi and Orosi to voluntarily consolidate their water systems in 2018. They also promised to pay for all the infrastructure and associated costs. However,
Janaki Anagha: Arosi has been very resistant to… Extending its pipelines to Easter Rosie,
Salima Hamirani: That’s Janaki Anagha, from Community Water Center. In fact, Orosi was so resistant that after two years of failed negotiations, the state stepped in and mandated the consolidation in 2020. But Orosi wasn’t very happy about that either.
Janaki Anagha: they sued the state water board. Under the argument that essentially that the state was forcing their hand to conduct this consolidation.
Salima Hamirani: I looked through the complaint that Orosi made against the State Water Board which was subsequently dismissed. But, it’s clear that Orosi is primarily worried about money and capacity.
Janaki Anagha: They believe that it’s a violation. They basically state that it’s a violation of proposition to 18,
Salima Hamirani: Prop 218 forbids local governments from raising fees or taxes without a local vote.
Janaki Anagha: And so what they’re saying is that. This project is going to result in unforeseen costs that they have not informed their rate payers of, and therefore there’s a prop 218 violation.
Salima Hamirani: They also argued that they were wasting staff time and money working on the consolidation. Even though the state would cover all costs.
And that’s being paid for by the state. Correct. So there’s no cost to ROSI. Correct.
Kayla Vander Schuur: The textbook definition is they are elected to promote and preserve the rights and the water of the Arosi community.
Salima Hamirani: That’s Kayla Vander Schuur, the community development specialist at Self Help Enterprises. who we heard from earlier in the show. And a little context here – Orosi is demographically a little different from East Orosi. A lot of farmworkers live there, but so do a lot of business owners and landowners. It’s a slightly richer town. Which means that Orosi sees East Orosi as a liability in some ways
Kayla Vander Schuur: And so, in their eyes, , if they are to take on what they may see as a financial hardship of this disadvantaged community, , they don’t want to be held responsible for, you know, customers that aren’t paying their water bill, which happens in every community, you know. For breakdowns, for issues in the infrastructure, they don’t want that fiscal responsibility to be on them.
Salima Hamirani: Basically, there’s a fear that East Orosi is so poor, and sometimes so dysfunctional, that it would burden Orosi. Which in of itself isn’t a rich place. it’s also unincorporated. Its utilities are also run by a small board of mostly volunteers.
Janaki Anagha: It is maybe a legitimate fear for another small district that they’d have no history of financials coming out of Easter. Rosie, because well, like, there’s no legitimate staff there to, like, really do the billing and so there’s no, like, there’s no digital, like, Record of rates there. So there’s no like history to say. Oh, yeah, these 102 connections will pay their rates.
Salima Hamirani: Fighting over water is a recurring issue in the area. Yes, it’s true that the boards don’t have oversight, so it’s hard to hold them accountable. But on a deeper level, poor communities are trying to share and manage water, a highly contested and vulnerable resource, which for years has gone to rich landowners and agricultural crops first, before they went to the workers toiling in those fields. And continued overpumping by agriculture means that there’s less and less water every year, and that more and more of it is polluted. A NASA study in 2016 showed that some areas of the Central Valley are sinking by as much as two feet per year because of pumping. And a 2023 Scientific Reports study found that 30 % of drinking wells in the Central Valley could run partially or completely dry by 2040.
In the face of that water crisis, volunteer run utility districts in poor unincorporated areas are trying to make sure their communities survive. This isn’t just a problem in one small town. It’s a problem throughout the Central Valley.
Pause.
So where does this leave the fight for water in East Orosi? Well, after the voluntary AND mandatory consolidations failed to produce a contract between the two towns Tulare County stepped in and started a process of forcibly annexing the two districts which it can do legally even if there’s no agreement in place.
Janaki Anagha: There’s a chance that we could still stay on the same timeline. And hopefully it’ll just delay maybe by a few months, but that’s my optimism speaking is that it’s not going to be more than. A few months delay
Salima Hamirani: Orosi may or may not try to sue again, but for now, East Orosi is still on track to get water by 2026.
Music
Salima Hamirani: But the battles over sewage and water in Central California means we need to think differently about unincorporated towns and the community utility districts in them
Janaki Anagha: these small, small. Community service districts and public utility districts. Are the places where the critical decisions around who gets access to safe and affordable drinking water are made.
Salima Hamirani: For one, more people should be able to run to be part of their utility districts in small towns. Since unincorporated areas don’t have a city government, a community utility district is the closest thing they have to democratic local self determination. Which is incredibly important. If they could function well, they could be an incredible asset in their communities
Janaki Anagha:that water district, East Orosi Community Service District, is, Overseeing the water access for those seven to nine hundred people just about a hundred homes so it’s almost difficult to think about it as its own government because it’s so small, but it is a government
I mean, I think the equivalent here in cities is like school boards, right?
Salima Hamirani: The same way school boards can be political, activist spaces, where a community’s values over childhood education play out, a utility board isn’t just about… well, the day to day operations of a sewage system. It’s also about the human right to clean water. or a dignified existence in a small town where there isn’t septic water backing up into your bathtub.
But getting more people to join their boards means there needs to be structural changes as well.
Janaki Anagha: there is already requirements around ethics training, but it’s poorly enforced, as is their requirements around language access, also abysmally enforced, mostly in English. Almost always in English.
Salima Hamirani: California has the right laws in place, but the next step is supporting utility districts – allowing non english speakers to run, thinking differently about citizenship requirements, creating accountability measures so that people can be removed if they’re not serving their communities well and maybe also finding longer term funding help support their day to day operations.
We’ll be keeping an eye on East Orosi and their fight for clean water and a new sewage system. And we’ll be sure to let you know when there’s a resolution to their problems. In the meantime, visit our website for links to today’s show. and also leave us a comment. And that does it for today. I’m Salima Hamirani. Thank you for listening to Making Contact.
