Montecito Sanitary directors cut their own pay, raise  questions about shipping wastewater to Santa Barbara

On the eve of the upcoming election, the Montecito Sanitary District board has decided to slash its own pay to $254 per month per director, down from as much as $1,524 monthly. 

Board President Rock Rockenbach and directors John Murphy, Carter Ohlmann and Woody Barrett voted this Wednesday in favor of the pay reduction. Director Dorinne Johnson voted against. 

“We’re here to serve the ratepayers,” Murphy said. 

A formal board vote on a first reading of an ordinance cutting the directors’ pay will be taken after the Nov. 3 election, on either Nov. 4 or 18, officials said. 

Sanitary District data show that in 2025, the directors were paid a total $43,693, based on $254 per director per meeting for a maximum of six meetings per month. These could include board meetings (twice a month), committee meetings and outside conferences. 

Last year, the data show, the directors were compensated as follows: $12,378 for Johnson; $11,154 for former Director Dana Newquist, who resigned in April this year; $7,113 for Ohlmann; $6,143 for Barrett; $3,810 for Rockenbach, who was appointed in May 2025, and $3,095 for Diantha Glaser, who resigned in May 2025. 

On Wednesday, Barrett and Murphy initially proposed cutting the directors’ pay to zero, but Ohlmann argued that future boards might be “heavily constrained” by that requirement. The board’s vote effectively limits their compensation to one regular board meeting per month, or $254, even though the board will continue to meet at 2 p.m. on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. 

Jostling for election 

Altogether, five candidates are running for three seats on the board this November. Murphy, who was appointed to the board last May, is running against Barrett, his colleague on the board, for a two year term. Rockenbach, who was appointed in July 2025, is running for a four-year term against Chris Francis, a financial consultant; and Floyd Wicks, a Montecito Water District board director. 

The present Sanitary District board majority of Rockenbach, Murphy and Ohlmann favors studying the cost and feasibility of two options for the future of the district before making a decision next spring. The alternatives under study are rebuilding the existing aging plant at 1042 Monte Cristo Lane as a “recycling-ready” facility; or effectively replacing the plant with a pumping station and shipping Montecito’s wastewater to Santa Barbara for treatment and recycling. 

Either way, the district will have to spend millions of dollars on repairs to keep its treatment plant operating safely while it builds an alternative project. 

A plant rebuild could be online by 2028, the district says, while it might take seven or eight years to negotiate a contract with Santa Barbara, get permits and build the infrastructure of pipes and holding tanks that the “city option” will require. Seven or eight years is about the limit of the “expected useful life” of the Montecito’s existing treatment plant. 

“The longer it takes, the greater the need for significant near-term expenditures,” Ohlmann said. 

As a case in point, he said, the district needs to replace its obsolete “belt press,” a machine that squeezes fluid out of sludge and is the size of a one-car garage. The de-watered sludge is then hauled to a dump. In January, the district hopes to run a three-week pilot test on a replacement machine. The new press is estimated to cost between $400,000 and $1 million. 

In launching their campaigns, Barrett, Francis and Wicks sent out a large mailer this month to Montecito households, advocating for the city option alone. On Wednesday, Barrett said he had been given an estimate by “word of mouth” of $25 to $30 million for the project. 

Rockenbach, in turn, has estimated it would cost the district $50 million to rebuild its plant or ship wastewater to the city. On Wednesday, he and Murphy said they would need more official estimates of the cost, scope and timeline of the city option before they could make a decision. 

“How much will the city charge and who will set the rates? How much will it cost to connect?” Rockenbach asked. He noted, too, that the city will likely have to move its El Estero wastewater treatment plant back from the waterfront later this century in response to rising sea levels. 

“What’s our charge for that?” Rockenbach asked. “… Some of us have made their decision; I haven’t.” 

Complicating the board’s dilemma, Santa Barbara officials have said they would require a $100,000 fee to offset city staff time spent on negotiating any future contract between the two agencies. If Montecito Sanitary pays the fee but later walks away, the city would keep the money. 

Murphy said wastewater was “a very valuable commodity.” 

“This wastewater is worth money,” he said … How best do we utilize this asset? That’s what it is. We have a lot of information to gain before we make a decision.” 

On Wednesday, the directors agreed to send all of their questions to district staff in order to define the scope of a proposed study by a consulting firm on the city option. The directors said they were looking for a more specific estimate of the scope, timeline and cost of sending Montecito’s wastewater to Santa Barbara. Hopefully, Murphy said, information that could be obtained without triggering the city’s $100,000 fee. 

Ideally, the board said, the study would account for the cost of negotiations, engineering, environmental review, permitting and construction for the city option, and would be completed by April or May. That’s when a separate $1.7 million report, focused on the design and cost of building a new wastewater treatment plant, is expected to be made public. That study set aside $50,000 for a technical memo on the feasibility of sending wastewater to the city. 

In the meantime, the district must urgently address not only repairs to its aging treatment plant, which was built in the early 1960s, but also to its sewer pipes and lift stations, some of which also are more than 60 years old. According to a report presented to the board on Wednesday, those repairs will cost $29 million over the next 10 years, not counting inflation. 

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