… Until recently my husband, Norm Benson, and I were mom-and-pop operators of a water treatment and distribution system at Clear Lake, an idyllic, nutrient-rich version of a green Lake Tahoe, about 110 miles north of San Francisco.  We love our community and didn’t mind pitching in. Over the years our mutual water system, the Crescent Bay Improvement Co., has become unsustainable. Our treated lake water could not meet state or federal drinking standards. … The state and a much larger water company in recent years threw us a lifeline, for which we are grateful. By the time we got help, our water hadn’t been drinkable for years. We were hardly alone. More than 400 water systems, serving 885,000 Californians, are failing across the state, the State Water Resources Control Board reports. More than half those failing systems are in disadvantaged communities, and two-thirds serve mostly people of color.
–Written by Mary Benson, a Lake County real estate broker who operated a small water system at Clear Lake with her husband.