then deluge pits neighbor against neighbor over water rates in Santa Cruz Mountains

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Victoria Pearce, volunteer president of the Aldercroft Heights Water Board, stands near a neighborhood water tank with a ration sign near Los Gatos on Dec. 4. Pearce is in charge of enforcing water rationing in the neighborhood as a result of the ongoing drought. (Patrick Tehan -- Bay Area News Group)

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A tributary full of recent rain water flows to Los Gatos Creek in the Aldercroft Heights neighborhood in the Santa Cruz mountains near Los Gatos on Dec. 4. (Patrick Tehan -- Bay Area News Group)

By Julia Prodis Sulek, jsulek@mercurynews.com
POSTED: 12/20/14, 5:01 PM PST | UPDATED: 1 DAY AGO 8 COMMENTS

A tributary full of recent rain water flows to Los Gatos Creek in the Aldercroft Heights neighborhood in the Santa Cruz mountains near Los Gatos on Dec. 4. (Patrick Tehan -- Bay Area News Group)
LOS GATOS — All this rain is causing a revolt in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

It’s a little one, in a little neighborhood of 118 households. But the tensions are deeper than the slowly rising Lexington Reservoir just below, and as turbulent as Los Gatos Creek after a month of storms.

A small group of residents in the community of Aldercroft Heights is protesting strict water limits and severe penalties imposed by the volunteers who run the neighborhood water board, which fears the creek that supplies their water could still run dry.

“If there’s water, why shouldn’t we use it?” asked resident Maxim Martynov, who take showers at the gym and brings home a jug of water from work to bathe his infant daughter.

It’s a question many Californians are asking as the historic drought gives way to one of the wettest Decembers in more than a century. While residents navigate flash floods and mudslides and watch the state’s golden hills finally turn green, the debate has grown contentious in this little mountain community. Many think it’s outrageous that if they go over their water limit, they’ll be subjected to fines that already have reached $1,200 for at least one customer.

“It really has divided the community,” said Luisa Almeida, who says the conflict severed her friendship with the water board president. “I’m not comfortable with where the money is going and why it is costing so much when people down the hill are paying a fraction of what we’re paying.

“I have no problem conserving, but this is crazy.”

After weeks of bickering, the water board on Tuesday followed the lead of the city of Santa Cruz and voted to ease a water limit — allowing households to use 400 cubic feet of water (about 3,000 gallons) a month, up from 300 cubic feet. But it kept in place what some residents call “draconian” penalties that kick in if they go over the limit. That means the average California family of four uses about seven times more water than Aldercroft Heights residents get before the fines kick in.

FORCED TO CONSERVE

Resident Jim Houts says the board is still using a “sledgehammer” to force residents to conserve.

“I plan to rally the neighbors and get them to show up and get some accountability,” said Houts, who works in the software business in San Jose. “I’m going to go knocking on doors at Christmas.”

The conflict has become an extreme example of the complexities, confusion and passions caused by California’s worst drought in generations and what happens when the science and politics of water get personal. The dilemma is extreme for small communities that depend on precarious single sources of water — like Aldercroft Heights.

“You start with, do you feel lucky?” said Jeffrey Mount, a water expert and senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute in California. “Hope is an important element of your strategy. When we get to February, we’ll have a much better understanding of what our water supply will look like.”

Just down the road at the Lupin Lodge nudist camp, the conflict got so severe last summer that sheriff’s deputies were called when the owner dipped a hose into his neighbor’s section of the creek to help fill his skinny-dipping pool.

HUGE WATER BILL

In Aldercroft Heights, Houts hasn’t lost his shirt just yet, but he wants his money back after paying a $1,000 water bill — most of it in penalties — after a certified letter threatened to shut off his water if he didn’t pay. Using only 300 cubic feet was impossible for his household of six, and 400 isn’t much better, he said. Before the drought, Houts used about 1,200 cubic feet. Now, with short showers, few flushes and hauling laundry into town, he’s down to 600.

Martynov has become so frustrated he refuses to go to the water board meetings at all, sending his wife instead.

“It’s not that we’re drastically poor and can’t afford the water. We feel it’s not fair,” said Martynov, who works in Santa Clara as a software engineer. “I joke that every day I work for my company, then I go home and work for my kids, then after 10 p.m. I work for the water company, going through the bathrooms collecting buckets of water left over from bathing the baby, or letting the cold water heat up, then watering the flowers or washing the floors.”

Members of the board who voted to replace the “ration” sign to “conserve” on the water tank beside Aldercroft Heights Road, says they are trying to help larger families by increasing each household’s water allotment. But they fear residents will have little incentive to conserve without hefty penalties. The board is counting on a 20 percent year-over-year conservation to qualify for more than $200,000 in state emergency drought grants to help drill a well on the property to provide a second source of water to supplement Los Gatos Creek.

“It has been probably the most stressful situation we’ve encountered up here in 20 years,” said water board President Victoria Pearce, 63, a nurse by profession.

“We understand the hardships,” said water board member Celia Francis. “But we’re still very concerned. If we are to get any of the money that’s offered to us from the state, we still have to meet that 20 percent conservation.”

RAIN TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

And Californians know all too well, she said, that the rain could suddenly stop — like it did last year — and the creek could go dry again.

Mountain people expect their relationship with Mother Nature to be a challenging one and they take pride in their hardiness and self-sufficiency. In this neighborhood, everyone is expected to own a generator, be proficient with a chainsaw and — if you’re the first neighbor down the mountain road in the morning — to carry work gloves to clear debris.

Now, with neighbors turning on neighbors over water, some say it’s time to come together to solve this latest predicament.

“The rancor I’ve seen toward the water board is totally unfair,” said resident Alyce Green. “They are us, for one thing, and they’re having to deal with this crisis. It’s unprecedented, and they’re figuring it out as they go along.”

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/env...cruz-mountains


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