Hi {{recipient.first_name_or_friend}},

We need your help!

We are seeking grant funding to restart our work on Santa Maria River Watershed issues. 

You may have heard from us before about watershed issues. Through extensive outreach, we identified several issues community members wanted to be involved with, including:

• Working on permanent solutions to flooding issues in Guadalupe.
• Making sure access to Guadalupe Beach doesn’t get cut off again.
• Extending the Santa Maria River Levee Trail from Santa Maria to Guadalupe.
• Creating a trail from Guadalupe to the beach.
• Improving the existing riverbed trail accessible from Preisker Lane and owned by the City of Santa Maria.
• Improving water quality in the Santa Maria River Estuary.
• Revegetating areas of the Santa Maria Riverbed that were degraded.
• Creating a bioswale to clean pollutants out of the river before the flow reaches the estuary.
• Creating an advocacy group to work on these issues and more as they arise.

We paused most of our work due to lack of resources. However, we have continued negotiating with PG&E to do mitigation work in the riverbed for them. This would complete some of the revegetation work we’d like to do. We will be asking volunteers to help.

We also still have a technical group working on creating a bioswale demonstration project that would remove pollutants from the Orcutt-Solomon Creek before it reaches the Santa Maria River estuary. We should be getting an update soon.

Our potential grantors would like to know how much interest there is by community members in these issues and others as they come up. 

Please let us know if you are interested in Santa Maria River Watershed issues by emailing me at [email protected]. And if you know of anyone who might be interested, please forward this email to them.

Thank you for caring about issues in Santa Barbara County. We hope to hear from you soon!

Jeanne Sparks
SBCAN Co-Executive Director