State regulators told a small Upper Lake water system in December 2017 that it had five years to find a source of drinking water not contaminated with gasoline additives. The deadline passed in December 2022. The contaminated well is still pumping, and the plan to replace it went out for public comment last month.
Comments close at 5 p.m. Monday, Aug. 24.
The system is Meadow Pointe, a mobile home park water system off Highway 20 that serves about 175 people through 93 connections, according to the environmental study now circulating for review. State records put it slightly higher, at 255 people and 91 connections.
Its two wells sit above a plume of MTBE and TBA — additives that leaked from underground tanks at a nearby gas station. The State Water Resources Control Board opened the case on those tanks in 1998. Remediation began in 2013.
Well 1 averages 15.4 micrograms per liter of MTBE. California’s primary standard, the enforceable health limit, is 13. Its secondary standard, which covers taste and odor, is 5. Well 2 tests below both, but the two wells stand 12 feet apart.
None of that means residents are drinking contaminated water. Six granular activated carbon filter modules, three running at a time, reduce MTBE and TBA “to levels in compliance with Federal and State drinking water standards,” the study says. The state’s own risk assessment currently classifies Meadow Pointe as not failing and not at risk. The treatment works.
What hasn’t worked is the timeline.
Two deadlines, both missed
Meadow Pointe’s Well 1 has a 7-foot annular seal — the grout collar that keeps surface contamination from running down the outside of the casing. Title 22 requires 50 feet.
After a 2013 inspection, the Division of Drinking Water ordered the well pulled out of service by Sept. 15, 2015.
“The well continues to remain in operation,” the study says, “and new orders issued December 15, 2017, extended the allowable continued operation of the well until December 2022.”
That December 2017 letter, titled “Inspection Findings for Cal 20 Village and Meadow Pointe Park” and carrying the system’s permit number, directed the park to find an uncontaminated source. Meadow Pointe was formerly known as the Cal 20 Water System. The letter stated that “an alternative safe potable water source that meets all state and federal requirements must supply the system within the next five years.”
More than three and a half years past that date, the well is still the source.
Those orders ran to the park’s water system, which is separately permitted and isn’t the Upper Lake County Water District. The district is the proposed remedy, not the subject of the directive.
$1.3 million in studies, nothing built
State funding records tell the second half of the story.
Since 2017, the Meadow Pointe system has received $648,843.50 in technical assistance — the state’s category for studies, engineering and project management. Over the same period it has received nothing at all in construction funding.
The Upper Lake County Water District, the larger system that would absorb Meadow Pointe, shows the same split: $656,346.27 in technical assistance, and $0 in construction funding.
Together that’s $1,305,189.77 spent studying a problem that hasn’t yet been fixed.
California State University, Sacramento’s Office of Water Programs was retained by the water board’s Division of Financial Assistance to provide that technical assistance, including project management. That engineering work is meant to support a funding application under the Safe Drinking Water Program, which is to say the money to build hasn’t been awarded.
Why none of it has been construction money isn’t something the public record answers. The documents show what was spent and what wasn’t built. They don’t say whether an application was filed and turned down, whether the project waited on environmental review, or whether it waited on the boundary change the plan still needs.
What the project would do
The proposal would connect Meadow Pointe to the Upper Lake County Water District through a master meter, replace Meadow Pointe’s distribution pipes — built in the 1960s — and decommission and cap both contaminated wells.
It would also extend service to nine parcels with 13 homes along Bridge Arbor North Road, where private wells are contaminated in the same way. Those parcels sit outside the district’s boundary, so the project requires action by the Lake County Local Agency Formation Commission to pull them in.
The district serves about 1,085 people through 401 metered connections, by the study’s count. Both it and Meadow Pointe are classed as disadvantaged communities by income; Meadow Pointe is severely disadvantaged.
The environmental document is a mitigated negative declaration, dated July 24 and assigned state clearinghouse number 2026071070. The district is the lead agency. Written comments go to the Upper Lake County Water District, P.O. Box 847, Upper Lake, Calif. 95485, and must be received by 5 p.m. Aug. 24. Rachelle Henry is the district’s general manager.
If the funding application succeeds and the project is built, the wells come out of service — roughly a decade after the state first ordered one of them shut off.