A coalition of public interest groups filed a civil rights complaint against California’s top water board last week, accusing the agency of perpetuating environmental racism along the state’s Central Coast. According to the complaint, the region’s agricultural industry has contaminated Latino farmworkers’ drinking water with dangerous levels of nitrates, and the State Water Resources Control Board is partly to blame.
The complaint was filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a rural legal aid organization, on the behalf of several local environmental nonprofits and Latino community groups.
“Ask yourself this: Is the water that comes out of my tap drinkable?” said Elias Rodriguez, the CRLA staff attorney who submitted the complaint, in a Monday press release. “In the Central Coast, the answer to that question is predicted by a person’s race.”
California has struggled for decades with nitrate pollution of its groundwater. Nitrate occurs naturally in ground and surface water, but it can reach dangerous levels in drinking water when animal manure and chemical fertilizers applied to crops seep into the water source. Nitrate-contaminated drinking water can cause cancer and thyroid disease; it is particularly dangerous for pregnant women and can cause “blue baby syndrome” in babies, which deprives them of oxygen.
The true scope and cause of the state’s nitrate contamination was first revealed in 2012 by researchers at the University of California, Davis, who concluded that agriculture accounts for 96 percent of the problem. As FERN has previously reported, since then, state officials have “chipped away at the problem with bonds and bills to fund community projects and direct consolidation of water systems. But the measures have never matched the scope of the problem or reached all the affected communities.”
Sandwiched between the southern sprawl of the Bay Area and the northern sprawl of Los Angeles, California’s Central Coast is an agricultural powerhouse. The region is home to Driscoll’s and particularly well known for its strawberries, which were among California’s top agricultural commodities in 2021 (the most recent year for which state data are available).
Central Coast communities rely on groundwater for 90 percent of their drinking water, and according to the area’s Regional Water Quality Control Board, that groundwater is widely contaminated by nitrates, much of which comes from fertilizer runoff.
Some Central Coast residents are at far more risk than others. In their lawsuit, the complainants cite a recent analysis, by scientists at Santa Clara University, which found that nitrate levels in the region’s Latino neighborhoods were 150 percent higher than those in white communities. Latino communities were also 4.4 times more likely to contain groundwater nitrate levels that are above that state’s drinking water standards.
Central Coast officials have tried to address the region’s nitrate contamination, as well as its disproportionate impact on Latino communities, but according to the complaint the state’s Water Board prevented them from doing so. In 2021, the Central Coast’s Regional Water Quality Control Board issued “Agricultural Order 4.0,” a first-of-its-kind regulation that would have set hard limits on the amount of nitrogen fertilizer farmers could use. The order was strongly opposed by agricultural interests, and in September 2023 the state Water Board stepped in and removed the regulation’s hard limits on fertilizer use—effectively stripping out its enforcement mechanism.
By doing so, complainants argue, the Water Board further enabled the environmental racism experienced by the Central Coast’s Latino residents and violated their civil rights. The complaint also notes that affordable drinking water is a legally guaranteed human right in California, but nitrates from agricultural fertilizer have nonetheless contaminated thousands of drinking water wells throughout the state’s farming communities. The Water Board has acknowledged that structural racism plays a role in that contamination; in its 2020 Racial Equity Resolution, the agency stated that “race is the strongest predictor of water access” in California.
This isn’t the only lawsuit brewing over Agricultural Order 4.0. Last October, many of the same public interest groups sued the Water Board in state court, alleging the agency also violated a litany of state environmental policies.