Santa Monica Promised to Cut Water Imports to 170 Acre-Feet by 2023. It Bought 6,086.

The plan's update reaches the council Tuesday with a supply gap, a desalination option and no new date.

In November 2018 the Santa Monica City Council adopted a plan to stop importing water. The Sustainable Water Master Plan it approved on November 27 of that year was not vague about the finish line: three components — conservation, recycled and purified water, and more groundwater — would add about 8,057 acre-feet a year to the city's own supply and "reduce imported water purchase to only 170 AFY" by 2023, a volume the plan's own table labels as kept "for emergency use." Last year Santa Monica bought 6,086 acre-feet from the Metropolitan Water District. That was 63% of everything it put in the pipes.

An update to that plan reaches the council Tuesday, September 22, as a study session with no money attached. It sets no new date for self-sufficiency. It estimates that local supplies can meet "80 to 85 percent" of annual demand on average, and warns that even that figure is uncertain: two of the city's largest groundwater wells at the Charnock Well Field are being replaced, and staff write that the real production capacity will not be known until those wells are running at the end of 2026.

We read the 2018 plan, the 2026 update going to the council Tuesday, and the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan the council adopted in June, and graded each 2018 promise against the number the city has since published about it. Four grades are used: met, missed, partial, and incomplete — the last reserved for a promise where the city has not published the measure that would settle it. Every figure below is the city's own.

The date: missed

Promised. Self-sufficiency by 2023, which the 2018 report defined as "approximately 99% locally sourced water." Delivered. The 2026 update says the schedule, which had anticipated completion by 2023, was "further extended to summer 2025." That summer has also passed. The update proposes no replacement date.

Staff name the reasons in the document: the pandemic, a citywide reorganization, supply-chain disruption, regulatory delay and financial constraints that deferred both the recycled-water network and new groundwater wells. The deadline has now moved three times. The council first ordered a self-sufficiency plan on January 25, 2011, and the target then was 2020.

The purchase: missed

Promised. 170 acre-feet a year of imported MWD water by 2023, inside a 15,560-acre-foot portfolio. Delivered. 6,086 acre-feet in 2025 — roughly 36 times the promise.

The 2025 supply table in the city's Urban Water Management Plan is the cleanest accounting available. Total supply that year: 9,619 acre-feet. Local groundwater from the Arcadia, Charnock and Olympic well fields: 3,442. Purchased MWD water: 6,086. Recycled water from the city's advanced treatment plant: 91. The 2018 plan had assumed 7,330 acre-feet of existing local groundwater as its baseline before a single new project was built. Actual 2025 groundwater production came in at less than half of that.

The five-year picture in the same plan is a straight inversion. From 2015 through 2020, MWD supplied 35% of Santa Monica's water and local groundwater 65%. From 2021 through 2025, MWD supplied 67% and groundwater 33%. The recycled-water share stayed at 1% in both periods.

There is a real reason for part of that, and the city gives it. The Arcadia Water Treatment Plant — "the heart of the drinking water for the city," civil engineering associate Dinaz Kureishy told the council in June, as the Santa Monica Daily Press reported — was under construction, and while it was down the city could not produce local groundwater at normal rates. The plant is back online. The Charnock wells are not.

The conservation program: incomplete

Promised. The "Optimal" conservation plan: 3,100 acre-feet a year of savings by 2023, a 38% cut in imported purchases, average demand down to 108 gallons per capita per day by 2025, at $708 per acre-foot — and, the 2018 report stressed, achievable "using existing budgeted resources." Delivered. The 2026 update reports that this component was not fully implemented: the Water Conservation Division was "reduced by 50 percent, leaving two staff members" whose work is mostly keeping the existing programs running.

Demand fell anyway. Total potable use ran 10,401 acre-feet in 2021 and 9,946 in 2025, and the Urban Water Management Plan credits conservation with a 20% drop in water use since 2013. Against the state's SB X7-7 mandate, the city's 2020 target was 123 gallons per capita per day and it came in at 103.

The grade is incomplete rather than met because the promise was 108 gallons per capita per day by 2025, and the column for 2025 in the city's own compliance table reads "NA." Two staff members are running a program the plan sized for more, and the figure that would show whether it worked is not reported.

The recycled water: partial

Promised. New alternative supplies — purified water for groundwater recharge, plus an expanded recycled-water distribution network. Delivered. The Sustainable Water Infrastructure Project, an underground plant that turns stormwater, urban runoff, wastewater and brackish groundwater into purified water, finished construction in 2022 and has collected regional, national and global awards since.

It is also barely used. The plant and the older Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility can together produce up to 1,650 acre-feet a year. Production was 65 acre-feet in 2021, 69 in 2022, 51 in 2023, 67 in 2024 and 91 in 2025. Last year's output was 5.5% of capacity. The Urban Water Management Plan explains why: the city is still completing the groundwater recharge wells and still expanding the pipe network that would give the water somewhere to go. The city has 30 metered recycled-water connections.

The groundwater: partial

Promised. Expanded local production — restoration of the contaminated Olympic sub-basin using settlement money from the responsible party, and a capacity expansion at the Arcadia plant. Delivered. Both, and they work. The Olympic project produced two new wells, a dedicated transmission main and a new advanced treatment facility. Arcadia was fitted with a flow-reversal reverse-osmosis system that lifted treatment efficiency past 90% and lets the plant make about 10% more drinking water without pumping any more groundwater out of the basin.

The city now runs ten active wells. A third Olympic well is out for rehabilitation after screen damage and awaits state approval to return. The two Charnock replacements are the ones that will decide the number. Staff secured nearly $40 million in grants and more than $150 million in low-interest financing to pay for all of it.

One number moved the other way while this was being built. Distribution system water loss was 187 acre-feet in 2021, or 1.7% of what the city put into the mains. In 2024 it was 1,015 acre-feet, or 9.3%. That one year of leakage is roughly a sixth the volume of the city's 2025 MWD purchase.

The price: incomplete

Promised. That local water would cost between $400 and $1,100 an acre-foot against $1,248 for imported MWD water in 2023, and that "ratepayers will benefit from the implementation of these projects." Delivered. No published comparison. The 2026 update carries no cost-per-acre-foot figures at all, and states that there is "no immediate financial impact or budget action necessary" from Tuesday's item. What the city actually paid MWD for those 6,086 acre-feet is not in either document.

What Tuesday's plan asks for instead

The update evaluates five alternatives and splits them into two portfolios. The near-term one, for the next five to ten years, is the two things already funded in the 2025 water and wastewater rate study the council approved: more conservation under the 2024 Water Conservation Master Plan, and an expanded recycled-water system that would add direct potable reuse to supplement groundwater. Staff say design work has started.

The long-term portfolio is everything else, to be revisited in five to ten years. Two regional recycling projects — MWD's Pure Water Southern California in Carson and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's Pure Water Los Angeles at the Hyperion plant in El Segundo — could supply Santa Monica through an exchange agreement or through purified water piped to the Charnock field. Neither is expected to be operational until after 2035. The fifth alternative is a standalone seawater desalination plant of up to 7 million gallons a day, drawing through a sub-surface intake; staff write that the technology may need to mature before it is cost-competitive.

The third alternative is the nearest one, and the least available. The Coastal sub-basin beneath Santa Monica Airport is an untapped aquifer that staff estimate could yield one to two million gallons a day. It is contaminated by historical industrial use at the airport, and the extent of it is still under investigation by the responsible party under Regional Water Quality Control Board oversight.

The plan's supply-gap chart projects the shortfall over 2025 to 2045 as a range between a best case, in which the conservation program hits its targets and local supply covers demand outright, and a worst case in which housing growth arrives with no new conservation. The Daily Press, reading that figure, put the worst case at up to 4,500 acre-feet short by 2045. The staff report's own text stops at the conclusion rather than the number: the city will likely keep relying on "some level of imported water supplies."

The other plan, adopted three months ago

On June 23 the same council unanimously adopted the 2025 Urban Water Management Plan, which concludes that "no water shortages are expected" in the city's service area through 2045 — in a normal year, a single dry year and five consecutive dry ones.

Both documents are accurate. The reliability plan gets there by assuming 7,406 acre-feet a year of MWD Tier 1 water in every scenario it tests, which is more than the city bought last year, and by using 2010 through 2020 as its baseline because the 2021-to-2025 period was, in its words, "unrepresentative of normal operating conditions." One plan asks whether Santa Monica will have enough water. The other asks whose it is.

The arithmetic ahead is in the same document. The city served 93,212 people in 2025 and projects 111,143 by 2030, driven by a state housing allocation of 8,873 units. Total demand is projected at 14,273 acre-feet in 2045, against the 10,038 acre-feet used in 2025.

Who acts next

Tuesday's item asks the council to find the update exempt from environmental review and to "receive and provide direction." Nothing is appropriated; staff will return if budget actions become necessary. The Commission on Sustainability, Environmental Justice, and the Environment reviewed the update on May 18 and supports it.

The near-term projects the council will be asked to endorse are the two it has already paid for in the rate study. Under the plan they are replacing, all of this was finished in 2023.