This Sutter County town can’t drink the tap water. Here’s how it will change
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- Robbins secures $8M state grant to build arsenic-removal water facility by 2027
- Golden State Water replaces county system, aims to ensure safe tap water access
- Residents rely on bottled water for decades due to contaminated groundwater
A rusty water tower stands alone in the skyline of Robbins, a Sutter County farm town not far from the Yolo County line.
Below the tower, surrounding the nearby farmland, water flows through rivers and a bypass while canals irrigate its fields. But even farther below the tower, beneath the soil, lies the groundwater at the center of the community’s decades-old problem.
The town’s farms rely on the water, its residents just can’t drink it.
For decades, the roughly 300 residents of Robbins have lived with tap water they’ve been warned not to drink, due to unsafe arsenic levels. After years of bottled-water deliveries and workarounds, construction began on a project that aims to fix that.
“We are very happy we will have drinkable water here in Robbins,” said Frank Alonso, a town resident since 1969.
An $8 million state water grant acquired by Golden State Water Company and Sutter County will go toward building a new water well and treatment plant facility that removes naturally-occurring arsenic from groundwater in Robbins, bringing what comes out the tap to state and federal drinking standards.
Construction began in June and is expected to complete midway through 2027.
“You don’t just snap your fingers overnight and make safe drinking water appear in everyone’s tap and available to drink,” Sean Maguire, state water resources control board member, told reporters Thursday.
Beyond distributing water jugs
Golden State Water acquired the Robbins Water System — about 93 connections for roughly 300 residents — from Sutter County in May 2022, while the county continues to handle the town’s wastewater system. In the meantime, the company has distributed jugs of potable water to Robbins residents, who will become its water customers when the project is built and tested.
The State Water Resources Control Board awarded the $8 million grant from its SAFER program, which focuses on providing safe and affordable drinking water to Californians without access.
The offloading of a relatively small county service to a larger company with established infrastructure and customer base has primed the partnership to improve drinking water quality while keeping utility rates affordable, said state water officials.
Eddie Scher, regulatory analyst for the Public Advocates Office’s water branch, told reporters that the alignment of a struggling small water system with a larger company better able to absorb maintenance and improvement costs had made the acquisition easy to approve.
“I really think this is a model and an example that we can look at statewide going forward as something that we can lean on for solutions for many other communities,” Maguire said.
Current water damages appliances
Sam Martin, 78, has lived in Robbins since 1979, when he and his wife moved there to raise their three children.
“We were told there was a problem when we moved in,” he said. of the water
Residents depended on bottled water then, as they do now, for drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth. The water piped into homes is often used for washing clothes, bathing and watering gardens. Sometimes, pets are given it to drink.
But the water leaves subtle signs of its contaminants, residents said, such as breaking down appliances like dishwashers and water heaters more quickly, and interacting with shampoo in ways some feel in their hair.
A committee of citizens, with county representatives, formed in the 2000s and helped prioritize the issue and find solutions, said Mona Sakurada, a 23-year Robbins resident.
“We realized that being such a small community, we didn’t have a whole lot of options,” she said. “We couldn’t spread costs with very many.”
Republican Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher, a former Sutter County supervisor for six years before being elected to the state assembly in 2014, had worked with those citizens at times throughout the years to find a solution.
“This community drove that and said let’s find a better way,” Gallagher told reporters. “And we did.”