Santa Cruz County, CA Water Use Rules: Recycled Water Rules (2026)

643 of the county zoning code lets a recycled-water facility be built to produce tertiary-level treated municipal wastewater for farm irrigation, but only on parcels zoned CA (Commercial Agriculture) or A (Agriculture) and only when the facility sits adjacent to or in the immediate proximity of an existing publicly owned and operated municipal wastewater treatment plant. The facility's sole purpose must be producing recycled water for agricultural irrigation; it cannot be repurposed for other water uses under this section. Because these plants often sit on farmland, subsection (D) requires the operator to minimize any reduction in agricultural acreage and to offset land lost to construction, restoring or protecting agricultural land elsewhere, such as returning fallow parcels to production, funding an affirmative agricultural easement, or moving topsoil from the project site to degraded farmland, so the mitigation equals or exceeds the productivity lost.

Subsection (C) also requires the operator to avoid conflicts with adjacent commercial agriculture during both construction and operation, including staging construction activities and routing traffic so farm operations are not interrupted. Because much of the county's agricultural land lies in or near the Coastal Zone, subsection (D) ties the mitigation obligation to the General Plan/Local Coastal Program's resource-protection policies, specifically environmentally sensitive habitat areas, riparian corridors, wetlands, and coastal water quality, so a facility that satisfies the agricultural-mitigation math can still be conditioned or denied if it conflicts with those coastal protections.

The section was adopted as part of a broader agricultural-standards update under Ordinance 5423, Section 26, in 2022, alongside neighboring provisions on sanitary landfills and agricultural accessory structures in the same article of the zoning code.