Sacramento Bee
In a major shift in California’s urban water policy, state regulators Monday issued proposed conservation rules that would lift the mandatory 25 percent statewide water cuts in place since last June.
Instead, urban water agencies across the state would be required to conserve on a sliding scale tailored to their unique water supply conditions. A draft of the new targets released Monday by the State Water Resources Control Board would allow districts to “self-certify” how much water they expect to have in their supply assuming three additional years of drought, and the level of conservation necessary to ensure they do not run out of water.
The release of the draft rules came on the same day Gov. Jerry Brown issued a new executive order declaring that drought conditions persist and that the state must take permanent action to mitigate the likelihood of more frequent droughts.Districts would be required to reduce water use by an amount equal to their projected shortfall. For example, in a district where three more dry years would leave a district 10 percent short of anticipated supply, the mandatory conservation target would be 10 percent.
In the short term, the order tells the State Water Resources Control Board to adjust water conservation targets through January 2017.
The order also dictates that the water board and Department of Water Resources create new, permanent water use targets across California. Rather than the sweeping regulations in place over the last year, the order says those goals should be tailored to “the unique conditions of each water agency.
“It’s time for the state to “recalibrate our habits,” and change them “into an abiding ethic,” said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources.
Under the governor’s order, urban water districts will be required to report water use monthly to the state, extending a mandate that has been in place for more than a year. It permanently bans practices deemed wasteful, including hosing off sidewalks or driveways, washing cars with hoses that don’t have a shut-off nozzle, irrigating lawns in a way that causes runoff and irrigating lawns within 48 hours of precipitation.
“Californians stepped up during this drought and saved more water than ever before,” Brown said in a written release. “But now we know that drought is becoming a regular occurrence and water conservation must be a part of our everyday life.”
An El Niño weather pattern delivered more rain this water year than during any other year of the drought, but not as much as state officials had hoped. About three quarters of the state remains in severe, exceptional or extreme drought, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center.
Even so, the state’s two largest reservoirs –Shasta and Oroville – stand well above historic levels for this point in the year, as does Folsom Reservoir, leading some water districts to gripe the conservation targets currently in place are too high.
California water districts have faced mandatory conservation targets since June. From June to February, districts across the state were required to cut water use by 4 to 36 percent, depending on how much water per capita their residents used in 2014. All but a handful of districts in the Sacramento region were mandated to cut water use by 28 percent or more.
The targets were controversial. Soon after they were proposed, Sacramento area water districts began complaining that the one-sized-fits-all rules were onerous, didn’t account for variances in regional climate, and didn’t give enough credits to improvements some districts had made to shore up local water supplies.
In February, the State Water Resources Control Board relaxed the conservation mandates for many inland communities, where hot, dry summers make it harder to keep lawns and trees alive. Many of the water agencies in greater Sacramento saw their targets fall by 3 percentage points.
“We don’t want to cry wolf and we also don’t want to put our heads in the sand,” said water board chair Felicia Marcus.
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