Teresa Acosta said she has come a long way and credits WELL with being part of the process.
Acosta is not only the first Latina but the first single mom to serve on the Carlsbad City Council. She is also on the board of directors of the prestigious League of California Cities, currently as second vice president, and will become its president in 2027, the second Latina to hold that post in its 125-year history. Additionally, she is the director of the league’s Latino Caucus; during her tenure she helped forge a crucial settlement in a major litigation case that has already lowered costs for water consumers.
Originally from Northeast Los Angeles, Acosta graduated from high school in Pasadena at age 16. She then started as a junior at the University of Southern California, having already completed two years of college units. After graduating from college at age 18, she married her boyfriend, had a daughter, and at 21 found herself a divorced single mother with a baby, a low-income job, and no car.
It was a struggle, Acosta said, but she found strength in her community and family, who helped her, and she is now committed to helping others with the same kinds of support.
She gives much of the credit to former state Senator Jack Scott of Pasadena, who gave her a job at 21 handling community outreach to the Latino and labor communities. She believes that position helped her better understand how intrinsically people are interconnected and made her a stronger person who cares deeply about her community.
Later, Acosta moved to be near her mother in the northern San Diego County city of Carlsbad, where she started her own company. Fifteen years later, it is thriving. She was asked to run and won a seat on the City Council in 2020 and was reelected in 2024. Three priorities to which she has dedicated herself as a councilmember are safety, affordability, and sustainability, all of which dovetail with her work on water issues, such as Carlsbad’s recently built state-of-the-art water desalination facility.
In the meantime, Acosta has served for the last two and a half years on the Board of Directors of the San Diego County Water Authority, a 24-member agency controlling the flow of water into the region. For 15 years, the water authority in San Diego was embroiled in tough litigation with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) involving longstanding animosity over water allocations.
Discussions over the suit inside the San Diego water agency had been ongoing for years. During Acosta’s tenure on the water board, she and her colleagues pushed hard to settle the litigation, which was finalized in May. Together, the two regional water entities serve 19 million Southern California residents.
“Settling the litigation benefits all of us,” Acosta said. “It provides more certainty about the cost of water. Now we’re working together instead of in opposition.” She credits current San Diego County Water Authority board chair Nick Serrano for his hard work on the settlement.
Acosta said she has known of WELL and its six-month-long UnTapped Fellowship Program for some time. She applied for UnTapped two years ago but couldn’t make it fit with her hectic schedule. This year, she made it work and fulfilled the commitment to attend every session and was among the WELLos who visited the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“[UnTapped] helped me understand the bigger picture of what is happening with water in the state and also to think of creative solutions to our biggest challenges,” Acosta said.
She added, “I’m finding a lot of people who don’t know about the desalinization plant in Carlsbad [that] I’m so familiar with. I’m continuing to research and learn more all the time about options for water construction, storage, and conveyance. I’m involved with WELL because I want to make a positive difference. If I don’t have full information about an issue, then I can’t make the best decisions.”
Acosta indicated that WELL’s Method of Inquiry has “helped me immensely—to have confidence I am here to learn and to guide my questioning.”
She said her journey in public service over water issues and through WELL “came home” to her in late June during an all-day San Diego Water Authority board meeting, during which they passed a budget. Because of know-how gained through WELL, she was able to show the Board members definitive proof that the litigation settlement agreement they had concluded in May had immediately lowered rates for water customers in their region. “We saw immediate, positive results,” she said.
