By Kristin Dobbin

“Some people say Alpaugh is the stepchild of Tulare County; I say we’re the forgotten ones. Rural families are an endangered species.” – Sandra Meraz, Dec 2014 in the LA Times

When Alexandrina “Sandra” Meraz arrived in Alpaugh in the Spring of 1963 at the age of 22, one of the first things she noticed was the water. It didn’t smell right. Sandra was a self-professed reluctant “pioneer” [1]. As a young mom, living in the tiny unincorporated community in Southeast Tulare County far from the Cabezon Reservation where she was born and raised wasn’t easy. In time, however, leaving would become out of the question. Over the next 60 years Sandra gave everything she had to Alpaugh, transforming the small, out of the way forgotten place as it did her. Along the way, she changed California. 

In 1998, with grown kids and time on her hands Sandra landed on the Tulare County Waterworks District #1, one of three locally elected boards that controlled drinking water provision in the town at the time. She didn’t know anything about water, but she asked questions and she learned. Four years later in 2002, Alpaugh’s only drinking water well failed, forcing the town into a crisis that would take years to resolve. Not only did the town have no water, but Sandra discovered that the water they had been relying on was heavily contaminated with arsenic with levels far above the federal MCL of 50 parts per billion. Lobbying local politicians and leveraging the media, Sandra helped secure corporate donations to set up and fill a 5,000-gallon community water tank from which Sandra and other volunteers rationed 25 gallons per household per week. Then she and others turned her sights on securing the emergency grants needed to replace and upgrade Alpaugh’s infrastructure. In January 2004 at a ceremony in Visalia, Sandra signed the check for a $1.5 million grant for Alpaugh’s water system. 

For a few years residents enjoyed reliable water that met state and federal standards, but this victory was fleeting and the safety of the water far from clear. After years of research and rulemaking, in 2001 the federal Environmental Protection Agency had announced that the arsenic standard for drinking water would be lowered to 10 parts per billion. Water systems had until 2006 to comply. Alpaugh’s new well did not meet that standard. Despite this fact, around the same time a proposal was circulated to raise monthly water rates by $20. Working with the Committee for a Better Alpaugh, the community-based organization that Sandra co-founded in 2000 in part to engage Spanish-speaking and low-income residents in the local decision-making, Sandra fought the rate increase on the board and as a community member. Ultimately a compromise $10 increase was approved, but their water was still not drinkable. 

In a town where “everything is political” [2], Sandra was adamant about being a different type of leader. In 2021 she told me “I have a voice. If I choose to use it, I have to use it in the right way. I don’t just go in there and throw my weight around because I speak English” [3]. This is exactly the leadership style she brought to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board when she was appointed to her first term by then Governor Schwarzenegger in 2007. Sandra was the first Disadvantaged Community resident, first low-income woman, and first Native American woman to serve on the board in any capacity. She never forgot the weight of that responsibility. 

Between 2008 and 2012 Sandra, a long-time member and founder of the AGUA (Asociación de Gente Unida por el Agua) coalition, played a key role in the historic campaign to pass California’s Human Right to Water law, AB 685. Sandra made trips up and down Highway 99 between Sacramento and Alpaugh to speak at legislative committees, attend rallies and talk to the media. And like all the organizers behind that push, she knew AB 685 was a beginning rather than an end. Sandra continued to make trips to Sacramento into her late 70s to support critical follow-up legislation, most notably what became SB 200 or the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience Program passed in 2019 (you can read an op-ed published in the Hanford Sentinel by Sandra in September 2017 about these needed investments here).

In a true testament to her efforts, when Sandra died on January 20, 2023, Alpaugh finally had safe water. Just over a year prior, the town’s newly constructed arsenic treatment plant was brought online, delivering safe drinking water to residents for the first time. She had followed the project’s progress religiously, attending multiple meetings per month and advising other residents to support the rate increases they needed to operate it [4]. But Sandra would be the first to tell us her work is not done. The re-emergence of Tulare Lake brought with it a swarm of mosquitos that terrorized the region all summer. Groundwater levels continue to decline threatening drinking water supplies. And most people’s water bills are far higher than they can afford. Sandra never stopped imploring us to love Alpaugh like she did, and it is past time to listen. We still have a lot of work to do.

And in many ways, Sandra is still very present in that work. Even with all her experience, Sandra always said she didn’t speak well. That isn’t true but I know what she meant, she didn’t have the education she badly wanted, she didn’t have the resources or opportunities she should have had to thrive in place. But changing that for the next generation, not just for Alpaugh’s kids, but also several generations of organizers and community leaders from throughout the San Joaquin Valley, drove her fight until she died. Sandra’s commitment and lessons live on in me and so many others she mentored over her many decades of service and advocacy including Martha Guzman Aceves, regional administrator for EPA region 9, Laurel Firestone, member of the State Water Resources Control Board, Susana De Anda, Executive Director of Community Water Center and Denise Kadara, her successor on the Regional Water Quality Control Board from the town of Allensworth. Afterall, as Sandra told me the summer before she died, “sometimes a voice carries” [5].

AUTHOR

Kristin Dobbin is an assistant professor of cooperative extension in water justice policy and planning at UC Berkeley. She is always looking for ways to make Sandra proud. 

NOTES

[1] Firestone, L., Kaswan, A., & Meraz, S. (2006). Environmental justice: Access to clean drinking water. Hastings Law Journal, 57(6), 1367. https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle =hein.journals/hastlj57&div=50&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals

[2] Interview with author in 2019

[3] Interview with author in 2022

[4] It’s worth noting that Sandra saw the arsenic treatment plant as a necessity and supported the rate increases to ensure that the community would be able to operate it but was adamant that rates were already too high for many in the community and vowed to fight future increases proposed by the Board she retired from in 2012. 

[5] Phone call with author, July 2022