Despite drenching rains and heavy snowfall this winter, California moved Tuesday to keep in place its statewide water conservation rules — at least for another three months or so.
On Tuesday, the staff of the State Water Resources Control Board recommended that the rules the agency put in place last summer relaxing strict mandates from 2015 should continue at least through May, when they can be re-evaluated after the winter rainy season is over.
The bottom line: Communities across California that dropped strict watering rules, fines and other penalties this fall will not have to reimpose them, and areas that kept rules in place due to tight supplies are likely to keep them in the short term, although in some cases they may drop drought rules if they can demonstrate that recent rains filled their reservoirs and brought their local conditions back to normal.
“This winter has been tremendous so far, and we are getting more storms coming in,” said Max Gomberg, climate and conservation manager for the state water board. “But California is a big state, and while the recovery has been great, there are still pockets of the state that are dealing with significant drought impacts.”
The state water board is scheduled to discuss the proposal Wednesday at a public workshop in Sacramento, with a final vote set for Feb. 7 by the board.
Water agencies, however, said it has rained and snowed so much that the state’s emergency regulations should be allowed to expire, and each local water agency left to handle its own affairs.
“The public can readily see that conditions have changed dramatically. Continuing the message that we are in a drought emergency strains credibility at this point,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, a group representing 430 water providers statewide.
Last week, the U.S. Drought Monitor, a publication issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, concluded that 42 percent of California is no longer in a drought, based on rainfall, snow pack, reservoir levels, soil moisture, groundwater and other factors. Nearly all of the north, from the Bay Area to the Oregon border, is no longer in a drought, the agencies said. But Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley have received far less rain, and are still struggling with low reservoir levels and depleted groundwater.
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In April 2015, during the depths of the drought, Gov. Jerry Brown called for a mandatory 25 percent statewide reduction in urban water use.
The following month the state water board ordered the state’s 411 largest cities, water districts and private water companies to cut use between 8 and 36 percent, based on their per capita water consumption, or face thousands of dollars in fines. Cities that had already been conserving for years, like San Francisco, Hayward and Santa Cruz, were required to reduce by 8 percent compared to their 2013 levels, while cities with high per-capita consumption, like Beverly Hills, Hillsborough and Bakersfield, were required to cut by as much as 36 percent. Many Bay Area communities were in the middle.
Most cities met or exceeded their targets. From June 2015 until May 2016, Californians cut water use 23.9 percent, nearly meeting Brown’s goal.
When rain and snow levels returned to normal in Northern California last winter for the first time in four years, Brown asked the board to ease the rules. In May, the board did so, allowing each water agency to set its own conservation target, based on local conditions, reservoir levels, groundwater levels and an estimate of how much water it would need if there were three more dry years in a row like 2012 to 2015.
The decision came after large water agencies, particularly in Southern California, put political pressure on the Brown administration after losing hundreds of millions of dollars in water sales. Some also chafed under what they called the state’s “one size fits all” rules that eroded their local control. But environmentalists said the new rules were too weak.
The result: Roughly 80 percent of the 411 water agencies gave themselves a water saving target of zero, including San Francisco, the East Bay Municipal Utility District, Contra Costa Water District, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Marin Municipal Water District, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Diego and Fresno, although many kept in place voluntary requests for conservation. San Jose Water Company, which serves 1 million people in Silicon Valley, gave itself a target of 2 percent savings, while Sunnyvale chose 5 percent.
Tuesday’s recommendation from the water board staff would leave those rules in place, with the board re-evaluating them in May.
““I don’t think this proposal sends a clear signal either way. This is basically doubling down on a mistake that the state water board made previously,” said Sara Aminzadeh, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance, a San Francisco-based environmental group.
The state should be doing more to lock in permanent conservation, she said, given that the warming climate is melting the Sierra snow pack earlier, and causing other changes to the water system.
With reservoirs brimming, flood warnings afoot and the Sierra snowpack at 154 percent of normal, the water board staff also recommended that water agencies that still have a mandatory conservation target can reduce or drop it if they can show big improvements in their local water supplies.
One other major recommendation Tuesday that is nearly certain to be approved by the board is a call to make permanent the statewide water wasting rules put in place during the drought. Those include a ban on hosing off sidewalks and driveways, and a prohibition on washing vehicles with hoses that don’t have nozzles, among others.
