Grants Database

As a follow on to the Santa Maria River Healthy Watershed Initiative, this proposal continues to bring attention to this highly degraded watershed and its impaired estuary by continuing with two aspects of the first grant that would allow us to drill down into the agricultural sector to advance the work initiated under the first grant. The first grant successfully initiated building partnerships with local organizations and got the watershed report card underway. Significantly, the first grant allowed us to leverage two additional grants, one with Whale Tail/California Coastal Commission and a second with Cal EPA’s Environmental Justice program. Those grants are currently active and focus on community education and outreach advances beyond the first Rose Foundation grant. We return to Rose to focus on only ag sector development with a voluntary storage/recharge project on the upper SMR, a voluntary wetland treatment project at the confluence of the SMR and Orcutt Solomon Creek (OSC), and Small Farm Advisor relationship building to position parcels for additional voluntary treatment wetlands along OSC. This proposal would also provide support to both CLC and the Coastal San Luis Resource Conservation District to position OSC for a State Coastal Conservancy grant using a model successfully implemented on the Lower Salinas by the Central Coast Wetlands Groups (CCWG) and Central Coast Water Quality Preservation, Inc. (Preservation, Inc.) with whom we are currently partnering to apply their model for treatment wetlands in the Lower SMR/Estuary. Both CLC and CCWG are parties to the CCRWQCB’s Irrigation Lands Regulatory Program’s Third Party Programs through Preservation, Inc. A successful OSC project would be a first for the SMR watershed under the 3rd party agreement.