WATER POLITICS

The Newsom administration is taking steps to lower your water use in the coming years, and for some communities — by a lot. In the Sacramento County city of Folsom for example, residents are tentatively projected to face water cutbacks of 15% for homes and outdoor water use as early as 2025.

Preliminary calculations show that the city of Sacramento will have to reduce its water use by 18% for homes and outdoor watering at certain businesses. Fresno is looking at a mandated 30% reduction. Modesto, 36%. Merced, 38% San Luis Obispo meanwhile, 0%.

Climate change and shrinking water supplies are behind a revolutionary movement by California legislators and regulators to make water conservation “a way of life.”

All of the coming water conservation targets will begin to be enforced over a 10-year period between 2025 and 2035. The statewide effort was set in motion in 2018, when the legislature passed a bill to mandate urban water conservation.

Will residential customers be penalized financially in the future for ignoring conservation targets? We don’t know yet as local decisions about incentives and enforcement have yet to be made. But some water officials foresee big lifestyle changes for Californians in love with their lush lawns.

“This is going to mean a wholesale retrofit of landscapes in California,” said Paul Helliker, general manager of the San Juan Water District.

Homeowners’ conservation needed

How will that play in communities such as Clovis, in Fresno County? There, lush lawns are a symbol of affluence and community pride at local schools and sports programs linked together by blocks and blocks of green grass in the heart of that community.

How will it play in the Coachella Valley, in the state’s desert southeast corner, and other arid communities that will be expected by officials to cut way back on water use?

“Generally, the hotter, drier areas seem like they have higher required reductions,” said Eric Oppenheimer, chief deputy director of the State Water Resources Control Board, the Sacramento-based regulator placed in charge of this new program.

For the city of San Bernardino, the expectation will be 32% in water consumption. Los Banos in Merced County, will be expected to reduce by 41%. Glendora in Los Angeles County, 46%. Kingsburg in Fresno County, 53%. But San Diego, no change.

As the editorial boards at McClatchy’s California publications in Sacramento, Modesto, Merced, Fresno and San Luis Obispo, there is no point in us approving or disapproving of what has already been set in motion.

Instead, we feel the best way we can serve our readers and fellow Californians is to advocate for transparency, clarity and fairness as state water regulators hammer out critical details of water conservation between now and next summer.

The State Water Resources Control Board has to implement this plan fairly, or this will be a paper regulation that locals may ignore as long as they can. Given this state mandate has a local cost exceeding $13 billion with no financial assistance so far, some state support to ease this transition makes sense.

There are some serious, unresolved questions as to whether the regulators have gotten some key formulas right to dictate how communities conserve water. Meanwhile, expecting communities to lower water use by 30% to 40% without any state financial support is a recipe for a backlash.

The new state approach to water conservation is a far cry from how Jerry Brown handled things while governor in his administration’s big drought in 2015. In an emergency order, he simply told all California residents in April of that year to reduce water use by 25%.

Most Californians actually did. But when the rains returned and the drought was over, both legislators and regulators thought there was a better way to lower water use and to separate this civic imperative from the weather cycle.

If California successfully pulls this off, it catapults to being the undisputed leader in state-of-the-art urban water conservation throughout the increasingly parched Southwest.

“This is a really big deal,” said Jim Peifer, executive director of the Sacramento-based Regional Water Authority. “Homeowners would have to apply water enormously efficiently.”

Mother Nature won’t wait

Behind each water supplier’s conservation mandate (officially known as the Urban Water Use Objective) is a different local calculation for four different buckets of water.

There is an allocated supply for indoor water use, which is established by the California Department of Water Resources for a decreasing number of gallons per person per day over time. There is a supply for outdoor use, based on the amount of irrigated landscape in the service area, the local weather, and the “landscape efficiency factor” that calculates appropriate levels of use. There is water set aside for system leakage. And for commercial and industrial businesses that have separate meters for their outdoor use, there is a water budget as well.

Water districts can pursue “variances’‘ to increase their supply budgets based on certain local conditions. Tourism communities that have high day-time populations, for example, can apply for a variance. San Joaquin Valley communities with major livestock and poultry industries can receive extra supplies for their animals.

There is even a variance for communities with considerable horses, but securing more water for them won’t be easy. At the San Juan Water District, with large-lot communities like Granite Bay where horses are popular, “we have to count the horses every year,” said district general manager Paul Helliker. “That is more staff we have to hire to be able to do that.”

Peifer of the Regional Water Authority said compliance starts at home. “You have to rely on consumer behavior to do this,” he said. “It will be very difficult for homeowners to continue to maintain a yard in such a way that could have healthy landscapes and allow the water service provider to maintain compliance with regulations.” He particularly worries about the future of Sacramento’s tree canopy, which took a beating in the last drought cycles.

The state’s proposal leaves it entirely up to local water agencies on how to reduce their use. Whether they do it through incentives for turf removal, or stiffer penalties for greater water use, is entirely up to them.

The board is scheduled to hold a public workshop on its proposal on Oct. 4.

In some respects, this is just the beginning. If this program lowers residential/commercial water use by 9% by 2035, the Newsom administration estimates that higher temperatures and more variable weather patterns will reduce California’s overall water supplies by 10% by 2040. Put another way, this conservation mandate may not even keep up with Mother Nature.

That’s daunting enough, but if public understanding doesn’t keep with our new water reality, a challenge for California will become a crisis. The time for all of us to understand and adjust to a new way of consuming water is now.