Water, sewer, and
the enterprise funds.
The bottom line first: Sebastopol has water and sewer infrastructure that needs investment, our own planning documents tell us what and in what order, and my job is to make sure we have the financial capacity to do that work on a responsible schedule. Everything below is in service of that.
Section A
The Enterprise Fund Oversight Committee
What it is, and why it matters.
Your water and sewer bills go into two dedicated accounts — enterprise funds — that by law can only be spent on water and sewer service. They aren't general tax revenue. Keeping those funds healthy is what lets us actually build what our infrastructure plans call for.
I serve on the Enterprise Fund Oversight Committee, an independent advisory body the council created in 2025. Sebastopol is one of very few cities in California with one. Its job is straightforward: make sure the numbers are documented and defensible, and keep ratepayer money working for ratepayers. That's oversight working as intended — not to score points, but to help the city get to a plan it can fund and defend.
Section B
What a Cost Allocation Plan is
Cities share overhead — the finance staff who process water bills also process everything else. A cost allocation plan is the formula deciding how much of that shared cost the water and sewer funds pay the general fund. Done right, ratepayers cover their fair share and no more. Done without documentation, ratepayer money can end up subsidizing general city operations.
The fix isn't complicated in principle: base the allocation on documented, actual work — the committee has recommended time tracking — and reconcile it against audited expenses each year. It just has to actually get done, and that's what we're now working to correct going forward.
Section C
The Grand Jury report and the city's response
In 2026 the Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury examined how the city has managed its water and sewer funds. It found that past cost allocations, which the city couldn't fully document, charged these funds more than Proposition 218 allows, leaving less capital for infrastructure than there should have been. The number the report put on it is roughly $5.5 million.
The oversight committee has laid out a phased, achievable path — on the order of $2.9 million in near-term corrections rather than the full $5.5 million at once — precisely so the city can restore fund capacity without creating a new crisis. Its priority items include refunding roughly $350,000 in legal charges that lack supporting documentation, moving a debt payment off the water fund and onto the general fund so the fund can better finance capital projects, and correcting the cost-allocation formula going forward.
On rates
The council recently froze water rates and eliminated the tiered structure. That's welcome for ratepayers in the short term. The committee's analysis projects it reduces water-fund revenue by roughly $775,000 over five years, and cautions that without offsetting reforms, reserves erode over the planning horizon — which is exactly the capacity we need to fund infrastructure. The committee's position is that a freeze is defensible when it's paired with the broader financial fixes. That's a real tradeoff, and residents deserve to see both sides of it.
Section D
Responsible infrastructure planning
Good infrastructure decisions start with a plan, not with whichever repair is loudest this month.
In April 2026 the city received an updated Water Master Plan from the engineering firm GHD — the first full update since 2005. It's the honest baseline: it evaluates our supply, storage, and distribution, and identifies roughly $10.8 million in recommended capital projects over the next five to ten years, prioritized, with cost estimates.
The plan's bottom line is reassuring in the near term and clear about the long term. The system generally meets current demand, our water meets state and federal standards, and our groundwater supply has been stable for years. What it also says plainly is that much of our infrastructure is aging and needs phased replacement, with some localized pressure and fire-flow deficiencies to correct. This is a maintenance-and-reliability challenge, not a crisis — and the responsible move is to fund the plan on a schedule rather than wait.
The priority projects
Two rise to the top.
Well #4 replacement
Built in 1953, Well #4 supplies more than half the city, and it carries a known contaminant (PCE) that is currently removed by treatment before any water reaches customers.
The water is safe today; the well is simply old and critical, which is why replacing it is the top priority — and that replacement is already underway.
The Pleasant Hill Loop
A single water main connects our two main Zone 2 storage tanks, with no backup route. It works fine day to day, but a past failure on that line once took roughly three-quarters of the city's network out of service.
The loop adds a second path so a single break can't do that again. It's the clearest example of buying resilience before we need it.
Beyond those, the plan calls for a series of water-main and service-line replacements, pressure-valve and tank maintenance, seismic assessment of our storage tanks, and an arsenic-treatment upgrade at Well #6 — steady, unglamorous work that keeps a system healthy.
Why it all connects
The Water Master Plan says we need on the order of $10.8 million in capital work, funded from the Water Capital Fund and rate revenue, and it isn't fully funded yet. That's exactly why the fund's financial health matters, and why the cost-allocation correction and the Grand Jury's findings aren't a side argument — they're about making sure the fund has the capacity to deliver this list. Fix the accounting, protect the fund, build the plan. That's the whole job.
The Documents
Read the source documents
Everything on this page comes from these two documents. Both are public — read them yourself rather than taking my summary on faith.