State Water Issue Is Resurrected : Drought: Santa Barbara has been divided for decades on whether to tie into Water Project. Opponents fear doing so will fuel more development.

As city officials consider various proposals for emergency water supplies, the longstanding controversy over whether Santa Barbara County should tie into the state Water Project has again resurfaced. For decades, the issue of state water has divided the community on the issue of growth.

Many city officials say they do not want state water because they fear that greater water resources will result in more development, which would simply create new water shortages.

“You’d have more water but you’d also have more traffic, smog and more people,” said Bendy White, chairman of the Santa Barbara City Water Commission. “So you’ll end up where you started.”

But Timothy Campbell, executive director of Citizens for a Balanced Community, an organization of business leaders, said water should not be used “as a tool to control growth. . . . Local government is supposed to do that.”

“Lawns are going brown and the cities’ streets and sidewalks are dirty because no one’s hosing them down,” Campbell said. “I think the majority of people realize things have gotten to the point that we’ve got to have state water.”

Santa Barbara County has long been a partner in the state Water Project, which transports water through a series of dams and aqueducts in Northern California to water districts throughout the state. But while the county shared the project’s construction costs and pays fees to ensure its entitlement to the water, it has not yet received a drop of it.

In 1979, county voters overwhelmingly rejected a bond measure to raise money to build a coastal aqueduct that would connect Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties to the project. County residents were concerned that the project would create rapid growth and was too expensive.

But because residents rejected the project, they now are faced with even more expensive proposals for alternative sources of water, said Campbell, whose group is leading an effort to qualify an initiative on the November ballot that would approve local use of state water.

Some communities in northern Santa Barbara County that have experienced rapid growth are in favor of importing state water and have even expressed interest in financing the coastal aqueduct themselves.

But despite the drought, the majority of city officials in Santa Barbara and other nearby communities, which traditionally have opposed development, remain opposed to tapping into the project.

“I prefer expanding (local reservoir capacity) and trying to live within our resources,” White said. “State water is not the magic solution to our problems. By the time we finished building the aqueduct, it would take us five to 10 years to get the water, so it wouldn’t help us right now. And it’s undependable . . . we don’t know how much water we could get.”