Summary
The SAFER County profiles turn the State Water Board’s drinking water data into a printable profile for each county. This guide explains what the categories mean and how to read a profile in context. It follows the definitions in the State Water Board’s 2025 Drinking Water Needs Assessment. The full set of county profiles to view and print out are available at safer-county-profiles.pages.dev. State Water Board’s SAFER dashboard (dynamic) is available at waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinkingwater/saferdashboard.html.
What is SAFER
SAFER stands for Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience, a set of State Water Board tools, funding sources, and regulatory authorities meant to ensure safe, accessible, and affordable drinking water for all Californians. Each year the State Water Board publishes a Drinking Water Needs Assessment. Its Failing criteria and its Risk Assessment give every community water system and K-12 school water system a SAFER Status. The county profiles present that information one county at a time, drawn from the State Water Board’s SAFER dashboard. The Risk Assessment focuses on small and medium community water systems and K-12 school systems. Larger systems, defined as those serving more than 30,000 service connections or more than 100,000 people, fall outside it and appear as Not Assessed.
The five SAFER statuses
The State Water Board places each assessed system in one of five statuses.
- Failing. The system meets the State Water Board’s current Failing criteria. These systems are out of compliance with, or consistently fail to meet, primary drinking water standards.
- At-Risk. The system’s risk scores are the highest in the Risk Assessment. Circumstances threaten its ability to keep meeting the goals of safe, accessible, affordable, and sustainable water.
- Potentially At-Risk. The system accrued risk points in the Risk Assessment, but not enough to be designated At-Risk.
- Not At-Risk. The system accrued zero or very little risk in the Risk Assessment.
- Not Assessed. The system is currently not on the Failing list and sits outside the Risk Assessment analysis.
At-Risk and Potentially At-Risk describe how likely a system is to fail over time. The Risk Assessment scores that likelihood across four categories, so a status reflects more than water quality alone.
Four risk categories
The Risk Assessment analyzes risk in four categories, and a county profile shows which ones drive the local picture.
- Water Quality. Current water quality and trends, compliance with regulatory requirements, and how often people are exposed to drinking water contaminants.
- Accessibility. A system’s ability to deliver safe, sufficient, and continuous drinking water to meet public health needs.
- Affordability. Whether households and the community can supply the revenue a system needs to pay for capital, operations, and maintenance.
- TMF Capacity. Technical, managerial, and financial capacity, meaning a system’s capacity to plan for, achieve, and maintain long-term compliance with drinking water standards.
Because the categories include affordability and TMF capacity, an At-Risk status can reflect the cost of service or a system’s managerial and financial capacity, and not only the quality of the water.
System counts and population can tell different stories
A profile reports both the number of systems and the number of people served. The two should be read together, because they can point in different directions. Water systems range widely in size. A county can hold many small systems flagged as At-Risk or Failing while a small share of residents is affected, and a few large systems can shape the population total on their own. When the Not Assessed population looks large, it usually reflects large systems that sit outside the assessment.
Small water systems are often less resilient than larger ones. The revenue for capital, operations, and maintenance comes from fewer households, which is the pressure the Affordability category measures. This is one reason small systems appear more often among At-Risk and Failing systems.
How to use a county profile
Each profile is three pages.
- Page 1, the county at a glance. The status classification for the county’s systems, a map of where systems are located, and a short-written summary.
- Page 2, how risk takes shape. The four risk categories and the specific indicators that appear most often among the county’s systems.
- Page 3, patterns and context. How status varies by system size, the economic context of the service areas, the conditions reported among Failing systems, and the funding reported since 2017.
Every profile draws from the State Water Board’s SAFER dataset, and the data date printed on each profile shows which snapshot it reflects.
Sources
For system-level detail and the full dataset, see the State Water Board’s SAFER dashboard: waterboards.ca.gov/drinking_water/certlic/drinkingwater/saferdashboard.html. The full set of county profiles is available at safer-county-profiles.pages.dev.
