The latest measurement …  showed that the “snowpack is growing quite nicely.”

 

Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the California Department of Water Resources, said the measurement was 130 percent of average at Phillips Station off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road. He says the storms are making a difference in building snowpack so far this winter.

 

“These are not major storms, but they are making a difference in terms of snowpack accumulation,” Gehrke says. Gehrke says “this snow is not going anywhere” and will be important for “reservoir recovery.”

 

Both the depth and water content at Phillips Tuesday were the highest since 2005, when a depth of 77.1 inches and water content of 29.9 inches were recorded, according to the DWR.

While the snowpack is the most crucial measurement, since the water it provides lasts for months to come and helps communities statewide, the drought news was also good on many other fronts. Here’s one example:

San Francisco recorded an impressive 6.94 inches of rain during the month, far above the 4.5 inches it averages in January and the most the city has seen in any January since 2008 … . The total, in fact, is more than the city received over the past five Januarys combined. (Don’t forget: San Francisco saw no rain for the first time in 165 years of record-keeping in January of last year.)

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Water officials: Too early to ease tough rules

But as the Sacramento Bee reported, state officials object to any complacency on the drought front:

California’s drought regulators agreed Tuesday to extend water conservation mandates through the end of October. The decision came in spite of increasing evidence that El Niño is delivering better-than-average precipitation, including an encouraging measurement of the Sierra Nevada snowpack recorded just hours earlier.

 

The new regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board mean urban Californians will have to reduce their water usage between March and October by about 23.4 percent compared with the baseline year of 2013.

 

That represents a slight easing of the existing mandates expiring this month, which require a savings rate of 25 percent compared to 2013. Sacramentans will be among the main beneficiaries of the relaxed rules, as the state board voted to ease requirements for hot inland communities where it takes more water to keep trees and lawns alive.

Nevertheless, as CalWatchdog reported on Jan. 19, state officials have already acted to ease conservation rules announced by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago. Bureaucrats appear to be trying to strike a balance — acknowledging good news on the water supply front without discouraging conservation efforts that have been strikingly successful at times.

Southern Californians who received cash rebates for replacing their lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping will soon get a federal tax form in the mail reporting the amount, but water officials said Thursday it is still not clear whether the reimbursement will be taxable.

 

Officials from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — which funded a $340 million incentive program — say they are sending 1099 forms to turf rebate recipients of $600 or more and leaving reporting up to participants and their tax advisers.

 

“We’re doing what we believe is our obligation, which is sending the 1099s,” said Deven Upadhyay, an MWD manager. Recipients “would have to work with their own tax adviser in terms of the way that they might characterize it in terms of the way they file their own taxes.”

 

This would affect most of those who received rebates, Upadhyay said, though he did not give an exact number. The average residential rebate totals about $3,000, according to MWD data. In some cases, residents received rebates of more than $70,000.

 

MWD spokesman Bob Muir said the agency believes the rebates should be “tax-free.”

 

California provides a tax exemption for turf removal rebates, but the federal tax code provides an exemption only for rebates related to energy efficiency, officials said.

‘Strategic’ water conservation promoted

The peculiarity here is that the federal government has been formally committed to promoting water conservation for decades, since long before warnings about the West’s expected “mega-drought” began. This is from a 1998 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overview of federal conservation policy:

The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA, 42 U.S.C. 300j-15), as amended in 1996, requires the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to publish guidelines for use by water utilities in preparing a water conservation plan. …

 

These Water Conservation Plan Guidelines are addressed to water system planners but use of the Guidelines is not required by federal law or regulation. States decide whether or not to require water systems to file conservation plans consistent with these or any other guidelines. …

 

The infrastructure needs of the nation’s water systems are great. Strategic use of water conservation can help extend the value and life of infrastructure assets used in both water supply and wastewater treatment, while also extending the beneficial investment of public funds through the SRF and other programs.

L.A. controller calls program a ‘gimmick’

But there’s another twist to this story. The MWD program that many L.A. and water officials want to be federal tax-free doesn’t appear to be very effective, according to a Los Angeles city audit released in November:

Los Angeles’ turf rebate program saved less water per dollar spent than other Department of Water and Power conservation programs, an audit released by the city controller said Friday.

 

Auditors found that money spent for rebates on items such as high-efficiency appliances yielded a water savings almost five times higher than turf replacement. …

 

City Controller Ron Galperin called on the water provider to focus its conservation programs in order to achieve more sustained and cost-effective water savings. …

 

In fiscal year 2014-15, the DWP spent $40.2 million on customer incentive and rebate programs, Galperin’s office said. Nearly $17.8 million of that went to turf rebates. Each dollar invested in turf rebates is expected to save 350 gallons of water over the estimated 10-year “life expectancy” of residential turf replacement, the audit said.

 

In comparison, the department spent $14.9 million on rebates for high-efficiency appliances and fixtures. Those rebates yield a per-dollar savings of more than 1,700 gallons of water over their estimated lifetimes of up to 19 years, Galperin’s office said.

 

The turf rebate program “had value as a gimmick that … probably spurred a heightened awareness,” Galperin said at a news conference, adding: “It’s the job of my office to look at return on investment.”

That’s from a Nov. 20 Times story.

Despite limiting water use, residents in lower-income areas have complained that they have faced substantial fines, while some of the Golden State’s most conspicuous consumers have escaped penalty. In Apple Valley, “where the median household income is below $50,000 a year,” some have struggled to keep their consumption below the limit, while one “home under construction in Bel Air has been issued permits for five pools,” the New York Times reported:

“Los Angeles officials hope to start imposing fines so steep that even the wealthy who populate Bel Air will notice. Elsewhere, though, fines have already piled up on middle-class Californians. The Central Valley city of Clovis, faced with an order to cut back 36 percent, has meted out more than 23,000 fines since the mandatory water reductions began in June. In Santa Cruz, where water supplies have run dangerously low, the city has assessed more than $1.6 million in penalties for using too much water.”

Mid-month, Gov. Jerry Brown issued a fresh order expanding and strengthening his strict water policies. “The order gives state water officials greater authority to deal with drought conditions and to cope with potential winter storms from El Nino, a periodic warming of ocean surface temperatures,” as Reuters reported, extending emergency conservation “through October if California still faces a drought in January. The order also extends the suspension of some environmental rules, lets some state residents capture more water and expedites rebuilding permits for power plants damaged by wildfires.”

Localities have braced for the new, unprecedented groundwater regulations as officials have been dispatched to implement and enforce them. “They are under orders to begin actively managing underground aquifers that for generations have been treated as a private resource, with property owners empowered to dig wells and extract as much water as they wanted without particular regard for their neighbors or government agencies,” the Sacramento Bee noted.

“But even amid the sobering accounts of dried-up wells, salt-tainted groundwater and collapsing aquifers in California farm country, no one expects regulation will be easy to set up or sell. Instead, the entire process — starting with just who gets to decide how much water can be ‘sustainably’ pumped in a region — is expected to spark lengthy debate and complicated lawsuits. This is particularly true in farm-rich regions such as Kings County, where the groundwater basins are critically overdrawn.”

Some farmers face the prospect of having to simply cease operations after a relatively brief period of time. “Land retirement is coming to California agriculture. The drought will end someday, maybe even this winter, but farmers will still face long-term shortages of water,” the Bee observed separately. “The relentless groundwater pumping that has kept hundreds of farms going the past four years is coming to an end.”

Meanwhile, other parts of the state have wound up with a large surplus of water, thanks to the uniformity of conservation regulations. “Unlike other parts of California, San Diego has 99 percent of the water needed for normal usage. But statewide conservation mandates have applied equally to areas that have plenty of water and those that don’t, so the result here has been water piling up unused while local water agencies raise rates to make up for lost sales,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “The new supply is just one more reason local water officials are advocating for the state to ease conservation mandates for areas where supplies are ample, which would lessen the oversupply.”

New Melones Dam (Wikimedia)

Demonstrating the simple power of reducing daily water usage, Californians have impressed regulators and policymakers by taking a huge bite out of statewide consumption. “The numbers reflect broad conservation success at a crucial time,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “Last year, Californians used more water in July than any other month, mostly because of lawn watering in the summer heat. This year’s urban conservation efforts resulted in a savings of more than 74 billion gallons in July compared with 2013, more than double the amount of water that the entire city of Sacramento will use in a year.”

Changing minds

The data lent some unexpected credence to what seemed like an outlandish prospect just a year ago. While many analysts presumed that huge new infrastructure projects would have to be undertaken to respond effectively to the drought, now some have begun to suggest that mere saving may be enough.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the sheer quantity of water saved — 414,800 acre-feet — measured favorably against some of the biggest and most expensive water storage facilities proposed to date. Both the expansion of Shasta Dam and a new Temperance Flat Dam on the San Joaquin River would open up around half that amount annually, the Times noted. Newsha Ajami, director of urban water policy for Stanford’s Water in the West initiative, told the Times “there are so many soft paths that we can take that might have a lot less environmental impact and be a lot less expensive, and still meet our future demand. This is probably a smarter tack than building more infrastructure, and moving more water around long distances.”

A massive new Delta tunnels project, promoted by Gov. Jerry Brown and set to cost at least $17 billion, has recently become the center of one of the Golden State’s several water-driven controversies. Meanwhile, predictions of a powerful El Nino storm season have done little to reduce ongoing jockeying between Northern and Southern California over water sources, water rights and water costs. And economists have begun to question whether California’s more limited access to water will begin to take a toll on the state’s pace of expansion, including many new housing developments authorized before the cutbacks began in earnest, according to the New York Times.

Unintended costs

The big savings have come with significant unanticipated costs, however — not always measurable in monetary terms. In what the Los Angeles Times called “a paradox of conservation, water agencies say the unprecedented savings — 31 percent in July over July 2013 — are causing or compounding a slew of problems.”

“Sanitation districts are yanking tree roots out of manholes and stepping up maintenance on their pipes to prevent corrosion and the spread of odors. And when people use less potable water, officials say, there’s less wastewater available to recycle. Water suppliers, meanwhile, say the dramatic decrease in consumption has created multimillion-dollar revenue shortfalls.”

At the same time, California’s smaller cities have been thrown back on their heels by the stringent new regulations keeping consumption low. “State officials are starting to realize that some water mandates have the potential to cause serious economic problems for smaller communities such as Lemoore, Sanger, Hanford and Livingston,” the Fresno Bee reported.

The problem suggested a Catch-22, with the choice coming down to businesses in those areas making water cuts that result in cuts to jobs, or residents making up the difference by scaling back their consumption well in excess of the new mandates. “The cities are at or near the top of the state’s priority watch list to reduce water consumption, according to state Water Resources Control Board documents. All are missing the state’s reduction mandate by 10 percent or more.”

Newspapers around the Golden State have focused on this seeming contradiction.

This story is from this week’s Orange County Register:

It’s a conundrum statewide: Officials demand that people conserve water. People respond, and water use goes down. But less water sold means less money flowing into public coffers, so prices rise to make up for lost revenue.

 

Folks feel that they’re being punished for conserving. But what else can the water agencies do to cover fixed costs, which don’t fluctuate like the rain? …

 

Southern California cities and water districts are selling less water now than they did back in 2003, but are bringing in much more money nonetheless, a Register analysis found. Rising rates are an integral part of that equation … . The cost of water has doubled and rates at most agencies have risen in recent years, and is expected to rise even more.

‘The financial logic is inexorable’

Last week saw a similar piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Whenever drought hits, Californians invariably do their part to save water. They cut back on watering lawns, shorten showers and fix leaks.

 

This conservation ethic has taken hold quickly during the current drought. Ratepayers in San Diego County and elsewhere in the state are meeting or often significantly exceeding their state-mandated reduction.

 

Now for the unpleasant but predictable sequel. As water use goes down, the rates charged are going up. And many of those good citizens, who are dutifully pitching in for the public good, are outraged. But the retail water agencies, who directly supply residential, business and agricultural customers, say they have little choice.

 

The financial logic is inexorable. If you sell less of something, to balance the budget you must either cut costs, raise the price, or a combination of both, the agencies say.

The Los Angeles Times also reported on sharply rising rates in areas served by the L.A. Department of Water and Power, but without the context of recent conservation drives.

Agencies ‘uncomfortable’ with conservation

David Sedlak, a professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley and a water infrastructure expert, suggested this issue is a little bit more complicated in an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Water utilities have an uncomfortable relationship with conservation. They prefer that we consumers gradually reduce per capita water use as our region’s population grows so they don’t have to make costly investments in new supplies. When we abruptly start cutting water use during a drought, the utilities fear the resulting plunge in their revenue. They have good reason to worry: During the last drought, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had to lay off workers when it experienced a $70 million revenue shortfall after customers answered the city’s call for conservation by decreasing water use by 30 percent.

 

Some of the blame for the misconception about the relationship between water consumption and the cost of providing water lies with how we are billed for water. To incentivize conservation, California’s utilities have created complex billing schemes in which rates go up when consumers use more than a reasonable baseline allocation of water. This is an effective way of rewarding conservation and making life a little easier for low-income families, but it feeds into the mistaken idea that water is a commodity rather than a fixed-price service.

But to consumers shocked by higher bills, just about any justification is likely to produce a sharp response or be dismissed as double-talk. Here’s how San Diego resident John Oliver responded to a Union-Tribune story about conservation forcing higher costs:

“And this is yet another reason why I refuse to cut my use below the level I want to use water at,” he wrote on Facebook. “Anyone who falls for this ‘There’s a drought, it’s terrible, we all have to do our part, but not the smelt or the almond farmers or the developers or the poor or the sick or the elderly or the illegal aliens’ nonsense is a fool.”

The figures eclipsed earlier embarrassments faced by water districts where consumption actually spiked, sometimes for unknown reasons. “California’s urban water districts cut consumption by 27.3% in June,” the Wall Street Journal observed, “exceeding a tough new state mandate to reduce their combined use by 25% amid a prolonged drought. The savings compared with the same month in 2013 came despite June being the hottest month on record in the Golden State, officials from the State Water Resources Control Board reported Thursday.”

Partisan jockeying

In a statement, Feinstein tried to tempter expectations behind her renewed push for relief. Some analysts expect Republican opposition over its high cost and environmental protections. “I’ve introduced a lot of bills over the years, and this one may be the most difficult, and a warming climate will only make things worse,” she said. “I’m hopeful the bill we’re introducing today will serve as a template for the kinds of short-term and long-term solutions California needs to address this devastating drought.”

But some Democrats have become concerned that Feinstein’s effort cedes excessive ground on environmental regulations, hewing too closely to previous relief plans that wound up losing Boxer’s support. Feinstein had determined that the drought crisis was severe enough to justify negotiating with House Republicans — a maneuver that undermined her support within her own party, causing her to abandon the push.

This time around, revealing Boxer’s support for the rejiggered bill “surprised some stakeholders who saw the negotiations fall apart late last year over proposed changes to endangered species protections,” according to E&E Daily. Although Boxer said she was “pleased to be sponsoring” Feinstein’s new bill “because of the enormity of this crisis,” other Democrats, such as Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., warned they were “very concerned about some provisions included in the bill that are similar to the House Republican water legislation” that drove Boxer away to begin with.

A long road

That legislation was H.R. 2898, introduced by Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif. As the Sacramento Bee recounted, the bill would have supplied farmers south of the Delta with more water and sped up the federal approvals process, where stringent environmental rules can sometimes grind water and infrastructure plans to a virtual halt. Hurried along late last year during the lame-duck session of Congress, it sailed through the House with staunch Republican support, but provoked president Obama to threaten a veto, and drew strong criticism from California’s delegation of Democrats in both houses of Congress.

Feinstein herself finally caved. “There are several other provisions that would waive environmental protections that need to be changed before I could support them,” she explained, according to the Bee. “I have said all along that I will not support a bill that would waive these protections, and that remains true today.”

News that Rancho Santa Fe and other wealthy enclaves with reputations as water hogs will get hit with the maximum 36 percent reductions hasn’t appeared to reduce the anti-elite anger. Now along comes a New York Times story that explicitly frames the issue in Occupy vs. 1 percent terms.

COMPTON, Calif. — Alysia Thomas, a stay-at-home mother in this working-class city, tells her children to skip a bath on days when they do not play outside; that holds down the water bill. Lillian Barrera, a housekeeper who travels 25 miles to clean homes in Beverly Hills, serves dinner to her family on paper plates for much the same reason. In the fourth year of a severe drought, conservation is a fine thing, but in this Southern California community, saving water means saving money.

The challenge of California’s drought is starkly different in Cowan Heights, a lush oasis of wealth and comfort 30 miles east of here. That is where Peter L. Himber, a pediatric neurologist, has decided to stop watering the gently sloping hillside that he spent $100,000 to turn into a green California paradise, seeding it with a carpet of rich native grass and installing a sprinkler system fit for a golf course. But that is also where homeowners like John Sears, a retired food-company executive, bristle with defiance at the prospect of mandatory cuts in water use. …

David L. Feldman, who studies water policy at the University of California, Irvine, said a big risk for state water regulators would be if the public concluded that water-conservation policies were “falling disproportionately on those who are less able to meet those goals.”

But what the NYT story doesn’t capture is that the water issue appears to have more potential to have genuine populist consequences than Occupy, which never became a true mass movement. The more Californians are reminded that rich estates use more water on their lawns every day than do entire apartment buildings, the more irate they’re likely to be. That includes the middle-class families that the Times’ story didn’t cover.

Look for lawmakers with populist streaks to start proposing related legislation any day now.

 Surprise results

The results of the UCLA study, “Free to Choose: Promoting Conservation by Relaxing Outdoor Water Restrictions,” were surprising to the researchers.

The study, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, analyzed a sizable statistical sample: 20,000 water customers measured by 1.9 million daily meter readings during different hours of the day to measure temperature and wind effects. The study was conducted in 2008 in an economic boom period and again in 2010 in a depressed period.

The amount of overwatering discovered wasn’t small: 20 to 25 percent of weekly consumption and 30 to 40 percent of peak water usage for the typical customer. The researchers call this wastage “rigidity penalties,” meaning that adhering to rigid outdoor watering schedules results in greater water usage than flexible conservation efforts.

In other words, most of the 35 percent state-ordered reductions in water usage in desert areas such as the Coachella Valley are likely to be offset by overwatering due to conservation efforts.

Assigned watering days ignores desert wind effects

Especially in desert climates, the researchers point out that strict adherence to an official watering schedule requires households to “ignore the conditions such as high wind events that reduce the efficiency of irrigation systems” (p. 3).  As anyone who has lived in the desert can attest, gusting winds and sand storms occur mainly in the summer months peaking in May.  Assigned watering days prevent customers shifting from watering on a windy day to a calm day.

How credible a study is this?  Well, the researchers first “cleaned” 15 percent of their data. Households were dropped from the study with ownership changes, vacant dwellings, significant water pipe leakage and seasonal vacation homes. The study also found it was unlikely that the threat of fines for watering on the wrong days was enough to get customers to comply with the watering schedule. The researchers selected the high desert of Nevada especially because of its uniform hot weather and sparse summer rainfall, which would have otherwise complicated their research findings.

The researchers found the outdoor watering policy in Reno was of “negligible magnitude” (p. 14) and had “no noteworthy residual policy effects” (p. 15), after controlling for frequency and pattern of watering.

“Free to Choose” works best for conservation

The researchers concluded that putting a cap on watering frequency was essential for curbing water consumption. But the “address-based assignment of specific watering days undermined conservation goals” (p. 19).

The implications of the UCLA study for public policy are:

“For policy-makers, our results suggest that adjusting existing OWRs (Outdoor Watering Restrictions) to allow for flexible watering patterns could produce substantial water savings at relatively low implementation costs. Moreover, as inefficiency penalties are highest at low frequencies, our findings also cast doubt on the effectiveness of policies that reduce the number of assigned days under progressively severe drought conditions. In such situations, a frequency reduction combined with a ‘free-to-choose’ policy is likely to promote greater conservation.”

On April 9, the San Diego County Water Authority called on the State Water Resources Control Board to change the formula of water use per person per day that is being used to set mandatory percentages of water reduction. SDCWA said that the state formula would penalize water districts like San Diego that have reduced water usage 12 percent since 1990 despite adding a population gain of 700,000.

Another implication of the UCLA study is that a one-size-fits-all drought policy may be symbolically fair but may not save any real water where the reductions are most targeted in desert resort and retirement communities. As Sacramento Bee journalist Dan Walters has pointed out, Gov. Brown often uses what he calls the principle of “subsidiarity” (home rule) very selectively.  In the case of drought policy, Brown has not adhered to free choice at all even though the UCLA study indicates it would be best for actual water conservation.

As CBS San Francisco observed, the plans taking shape within three of the state’s largest water agencies reflect a cost crunch impacting the Santa Clara Valley Water District and the San Francisco and East Bay Municipal Utilities District.

The agencies have found themselves between a rock and a hard place this year, reluctant to put the squeeze on already restive residents, but strapped with mounting costs set to increase even further.

As Beau Goldie, CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, bluntly told the San Jose Mercury News, “We don’t want to raise water rates.” But Goldie and other district chiefs have targeted hikes of 30 percent or more because water conservation has slashed sales. As the Mercury News reported:

“Because they have sold less water, the agencies have lost tens millions of dollars in revenues. They also have had to spend more money on drought-related expenses such as buying extra water from outside the Bay Area to help meet demand, expanding public relations budgets to ask the public to use less water amid shortages, and offering rebates to homeowners who replace lawns with drought-tolerant plants or old, leaky appliances with water-efficient ones.”

Groundwater bank

Santa Clara Valley has been reduced to shelling out millions of dollars to pump in water from a so-called “groundwater bank” located in Kern County. EBMUD, falling back on the same strategy, has put its hopes in using its share of limited drought relief funds to bankroll imports of its own, spokeswoman Abby Figueroa told KTVU Fox Channel 2 News. “We will have to continue asking our customers to cut back their usage,” she added. “How much is still being determined.”

According to KTVU, EBMUD saw customers conserve last year at a rate 13 percent higher than two years ago. But this year, residents seemed close to maxing out their ability to cut back. So far, the savings rate has dropped to just 4 percent.

Still, the size of the dropoff had EMMUD contemplating an increase in its current voluntary conservation rate to 15 percent, ABC 7 reported. Voluntary conservation could even be replaced with mandatory conservation.

Spreading confusion

At the same time as the utilities have sorted through unattractive options, water management outside the San Francisco Bay has also been hit with confusion and frustration. Because of the complexity created by the Golden State’s separate state and federal water programs, Kern County will receive more water than communities and farms on the Eastern and Western sides of the San Joaquin Valley.

As the Fresno Bee reported, while the State Water Project has supplied Kern, the federal government’s Central Valley Project has kept water flowing to those in the East and West of the Valley — that is, when there is water.

Though similar in size and infrastructure, the federal and state projects’ differences have created “a complex and uncomfortable flashpoint in the Valley,” according to the Bee. It added:

“For one thing, the smaller state project has a somewhat lighter burden, because it does not have to provide more than 300,000 acre-feet of water for wildlife refuges as the CVP does.

“The subtle difference is a big deal in a drought, when there is so little water to go around. Other below-the-radar differences, such as water-delivery pecking order dating to the 1800s, are magnified in a drought. Those with historic rights get their water first.”

With challenges radiating outward from San Francisco Bay into the Central Valley, utilities chiefs along the Central Coast and in Southern California soon could have reason to fret.

Could cities such as drought-vulnerable Los Angeles come to regret that a “privatization” provision in the old $11.1 billion state water bond was removed?

Back in 2009, there was an outcry against language in the original version of a proposed state water bond that would have allowed private companies to own, operate and profit from water projects partly funded by taxpayers dollars. Critics said it opened a door to dangerous privatization.

But the bill merely contained a provision for joint ventures with nongovernment partners. Nevertheless, it eventually was stricken from the bill, and the new $7.5 billion water bond bill on the November ballot omits it as well.

What’s going on in San Antonio — which has been dealing with a harsh drought for years —  suggests that was a major mistake.

According to a new study by The Environmental Hydrology Laboratory at the University of Florida, both San Antonio and  Los Angeles are extremely drought-vulnerable cities. San Antonio came in dead last among the 225 ranked cities, with L.A. was ranked 220th. High-ranking cities are near very large lakes or rivers while low-ranking cities are in arid areas and have low local storage capacities.

Innovation vs. ineffective status quo

Both cities have adopted successful conservation policies to deal with droughts. San Antonio’s per capita water use is 127 gallons per day as of 2013. Per capita usage in Los Angeles was 123 gallons per day as of 2011.

But San Antonio has recently embraced public-private partnerships as a way to survive prolonged droughts, while L.A. sticks to the standard California playbook.

Los Angeles’ five-year water resource plan — adopted in June 2012 — mainly depends on a set of recycled water projects. In addition, L.A.’s plan will depend on the drought ending and an end to the current curtailments of imported state water. Two new state reservoirs that would be funded by the state water bond wouldn’t be available until about 2023 and would only add about 1 percent to state reservoir supplies.

L.A. is in the process of recharging groundwater supplies with purified recycled water — “toilet-to-tap” water — that would produce up to 15,000 acre-feet of new water by 2022 and 30,000 acre-feet to 2035 to offset the future loss of imported water.

All told, L.A. is planning to produce 59,000 acre-feet of recycled water by 2035. That would equate to about 13.4 gallons of water added per household per day by 2035. But this would be water to backfill projected future losses of water from shortages of state imported water.

L.A. has no water storage or desalination plants on the planning board over the next five years and remains dependent on a long-term solution in Sacramento.

San Antonio officials not waiting for others to act

Unlike Los Angeles, the San Antonio Water System is not depending on the state or Congress to solve problems posed by its prolonged drought.  San Antonio is moving toward importing 50,000 acre-feet of water from Burleson County by partnering with the Abengoa Water Corp. and Blue Water Systems of Austin, Tex., for purchase of water through a new 142-mile pipeline to be completed by 2019. This is called the Vista Ridge Plan.

In the plan, 3,400 water rights holders in Burleson County will be paid an annual fee for their water. Thus, no condemnation of land for water wells would be needed, although pipeline rights of ways would have to be acquired.

Abengoa is a private, international water and energy infrastructure corporation based in Seville, Spain.

San Antonio water officials selected a proposal from Abengoa to buy water from the Vista Ridge Pipeline Project through a competitive proposal process from nine other proposals to provide a solution for San Antonio’s future water demands. While Southern California has been trying to obtain political approvals for its Peripheral Canal or other big projects since 1982, San Antonio is moving ahead for a contract to buy water from Abengoa in five years. The pipeline would be financed, built and operated by Abengoa.

Additionally, San Antonio’s water agency is renting available capacity in an existing pipeline to bring about 25,000 acre-feet of water from the Carrizo Aquifer in Gonzales County by 2015.

By 2016, San Antonio’s water agency also plans to have completed a desalination plant that will produce about 33,000 acre-feet of water per year by desalting local groundwater at a cost of $1,138 per acre-foot of water.

Overall, San Antonio is planning on adding 108,000 acre-feet of new water over the next five years. That equates to adding 35.2 billion gallons of water or 1,212 gallons of new water per year per existing household per day.  San Antonio plans to sell any unused portion of its water supplies from the Vista Ridge Pipeline to other cities to reduce water rates to its customers.

At an Aug. 12 symposium at the University of Texas at San Antonio on the Vista Ridge Pipeline Project, one topic was the difference between California and Texas as to finding solutions to drought (see bottom of page here). San Antonio leaders attributed the difference to a “culture” of “free enterprise and capitalism.” They specifically called out Sacramento as a city, which, in the past, has not even had water meters as part of the problem.

Smaller San Antonio to add far more water than L.A.

Ecowatch.com ran an article titled “Which City Will Run Out of Water First?” on Sept. 3 reporting the new drought vulnerability rankings for 225 large cities in the U.S.

San Antonio may have the worst ranking but has embraced allowing the private sector to propose a drought solution for the city. San Antonio does not have to go to voters to approve a water bond. The new added water will increase water rates 16 percent.

In comparison, Los Angeles’ wholesale imported water rates rose 15 percent in 2009, water deliveries were cut and customers had to cut usage by 20 percent.

The chart below tells the story crisply: San Antonio, one-third the size of Los Angeles, is on track to add vastly more water resources in coming years and decades. L.A.’s government-first approach simply can’t match the results produced by San Antonio’s innovation.