Drought-busting levels of rain and snow have put pressure to lift emergency restrictions on usage, but California regulators declined to ease up on the longstanding curbs.

“Amid the ongoing succession of storms, water managers up and down the state are urging regulators in Sacramento to permanently cancel historic, emergency drought rules that have been in place for 18 months,” U-T San Diego reported late last month. “It’s an escalation of their ongoing opposition to these restrictions, which already have been eased considerably since homeowners and businesses were first forced to cut consumption by a statewide average of 25 percent. California doesn’t have an official definition for statewide drought, leaving it up to the governor’s discretion on when to announce an end to that designation.”

Swift, uneven progress

But in a new report, the State Water Resources Control Board insisted that the drought’s persistent impact had to be mitigated further before any changes could be considered. “Some reservoirs remain critically low and groundwater storage remains depleted in many areas due to the continued impact of prolonged drought,” they concluded, according to the Sacramento Bee. “Precipitation cannot be counted on to continue, and snowpack levels, while above average for the current time of year, are subject to rapid reductions as seen in 2016 and before.” While the extraordinary rules imposed to conserve water were on track to expire at the end of this month, the board planned to extend them 270 days into the future.

The caution struck a contrast to the swiftness of California’s transformation from dry to wet. “According to the U.S. drought monitor website,” HotAir noted, “there are no areas of exceptional drought left in the state.” Updated data, the site observed, “indicates that one year ago 64 percent of the state was considered to be under either extreme or exceptional drought conditions, the two highest categories. Now, largely thanks to the storms over the past month, that figure has dropped to 2 percent.”

Continued challenges

Water districts have now had to scramble to figure out how to store what could be excess water if the new trends continue. Although the pathway to new storage initiatives has been cleared and funded, the state’s bureaucratic process will add extra time. “In 2014, voters approved a $7.5 billion water bond, including $2.7 billion for storage projects, to provide funding to water projects and programs throughout the state,” KXTV recalled. “Since then, government agencies across the state have been developing the process for accepting proposals.” This month, the station added, “the Water Commission will consider bids on numerous water storage projects across the state.”

And milder drought conditions have persisted. “Overall, the monitor … showed 51 percent of California remains in some form of drought, but that’s down from just over 57 percent last week and compares with 81 percent three months ago,” CNBC reported. And in a twist adding an unexpected layer of politics to the fraught question of resource management in the most beleaguered parts of the state, some Central Valley water officials became the focus of a misspending scandal. “An irrigation district in Central California’s prime farming region gave its employees free housing, interest-free loans and credit cards that the workers used to buy tickets for concerts and professional sports games, possibly breaking the law,” said state officials according to NBC Bay Area. “Employees at Panoche Water District based in Firebaugh used the credit cards to buy season tickets to Raiders and Oakland A’s games and attend a Katy Perry concert, officials said.”

The long view

Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown has kept a focus on what regulatory framework will persist even after all drought conditions have been adequately mitigated. “Brown has asked the state agency to design new conservation rules for water districts that will stay in place regardless of whether California is in drought,” according to U-T San Diego. “In the long run, the governor and state regulators are moving forward with their plan to establish permanent usage budgets tailored to each water district, as well as a suite of other regulations governing water consumption. The new rules are expected to include caps for both indoor use and outdoor water use, taking into consideration differences in weather patterns and other factors from one geographic region to another.”

The mood of the public and officials alike has tilted hard against outsized consumers. Although “water providers such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power have refused to divulge the names of California’s top residential water users,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “the DWP is now considering changes to its water conservation ordinance that would impose ‘substantial’ fines for excessive use and make the names public.”

Pressed by “public outrage, and questioning by Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz,” the Times noted, DWP would follow in the East Bay’s footsteps, where agency overusers recently confronted “an excessive-use penalty ordinance that allows it to fine and name water customers who consume more than four times the average household.”

From nagging to snitching

In the Bay Area, a culture of water shaming has developed from the ground up. In a report on “the domestic water police,” the New York Times recently identified “moms and dads, spouses and partners, children, even co-workers and neighbors” as among the residents “quick to wag a finger when they spot people squandering moisture, such as a faucet left running while they’re brushing their teeth, or using too much water to clean dinner plates in the sink. And showers? No lingering allowed.”

More nagging has gone hand in hand with more snitching. The Times reported that “state water agencies issued more than 70,000 warnings for overuse and more than 20,000 penalties” this June and July, with many issued when “someone’s neighbor ratted on them,” according to State Water Resources Control Board climate and conservation manager Max Gomberg.

Although those penalties landed on a relatively small group of die-hard squanderers, the state has now leveled substantial fines on whole cities that failed to meet conservation targets. “While most communities continue to hit mandated conservation targets, a few have consistently missed,” the Sacramento Bee noted. “All four were in Southern California: Beverly Hills, Indio, Redlands and Coachella Valley Water District. Each was fined $61,000.”

These sums could be only the beginning. “The penalties are based on the board’s authority to issue fines of $500 per day for violations of its emergency regulation,” according to the Press-Enterprise. “The board could also issue the providers a cease and desist order, which carries a fine up to $10,000 per day for non-compliance.”

A vicious circle

The crackdown has come as agencies have hiked rates for users who do conserve. “Water providers in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the state have recently told customers that rates will go up at least temporarily, as utilities struggle to pay for building and repairing pipes, buying water and other costs, even as customers cut back,” according to Reuters. Agencies have sometimes wound up a victim of their own success. “In Los Angeles, conservation led to a $111 million drop in revenues during the fiscal year that ended July 1, a period mostly before the mandatory cutbacks kicked into high gear, Department of Water and Power budget director Neil Guglielmo said Friday.”

But for now, regulators have tried to emphasize the positive. “Californians slashed their water use 26 percent in September, meeting Gov. Jerry Brown’s goal of 25 percent for the fourth straight month,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing recently released state data. Though encouraged by the numbers, water agencies have strained to strike a messaging balance between threats and warnings on the one hand and encouragement and pride on the other, hoping to give savers a sense of reward without subtly encouraging a return to laxity. Utilities, noted the Chronicle, remained dedicated to “trying to keep the conservation message front and center after four dry years, especially as residents may be tempted to become less diligent with forecasts calling for a wetter-than-average winter.”

Hard targets

Water suppliers braced for fines in areas where consumption didn’t hit aggressive targets set by Gov. Jerry Brown. As the Los Angeles Times noted, “16 water suppliers missed their conservation targets by 15 or more percentage points and will be contacted by water officials for an explanation, as well as corrective actions, within the next two weeks,” according to officials.

Californians have made strenuous efforts to comply. “Data released by the State Water Resources Control Board showed that Californians had reduced their water consumption by 59 billion gallons compared with June 2013, indicating what officials called a fundamental change in water-use habits,” the Times added.

But that hasn’t stopped regulators from pushing harder to ferret out the offenders. At a new website, savewater.ca.gov, Golden Staters can snitch on their neighbors with “details and photos of water waste,” the Associated Press reported. “Complaints are then sent to local government agencies based on the address of the offense.”

A reversal in court

Water guzzlers have more to fear than new websites, however. Farmers hit by tightened taps recently faced another setback as relief they sought from regulators was rejected in court. “In a closely watched case with statewide implications, a Sacramento Superior Court judge declined a request by the West Side Irrigation District, a small agency in the Delta, for a preliminary injunction that would have reined in the State Water Resources Control Board. The state board is pursuing fines and other enforcement actions against West Side and a few other water districts over allegations of illegal pumping,” the Sacramento Bee noted.

The decision served to put farmers and suppliers on notice that water policing would increase. Already, the Water Board “has sent thousands of letters to farmers, water districts and corporations holding rights to divert water from rivers and streams,” the Associated Press observed, indicating “supplies were running too low in the fourth year of drought to meet demand.”

Punishments could be severe. “Suppliers that repeatedly fail to meet their savings targets could face fines of as much as $10,000 a day,” according to the Times. Although the West Side District had the option of begging for mercy before the Board, its lawyers doubted the possibility of a fair hearing, the Bee reported.

Environmental fines

In addition to heavy use, water regulators have also indicated their willingness to crack down on environmental accidents. In the wake of the Refugio State Beach oil spill, the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board asked Attorney General Kamala Harris to consider “penalties of up to $25,000 per day of violation, plus $25 for every gallon of oil spilled” for the pipeline’s owners, according to Yahoo News.

“‘The Water Board will work closely with the Attorney General’s office to make sure all those responsible for the Refugio spill face the strongest enforcement measures allowed by law,’ Board Chair Jean-Pierre Wolff said in a news release.”

But regulators confronted an uphill battle to stave off environmental damage in drought conditions. California’s water woes have taken a harsh toll on the Delta smelt, a tiny fish that has long been the bane of area farmers who can’t tap its waters without running afoul of state and federal rules.

“The silvery, finger-sized fish has been in trouble for years, but the four-year drought is helping to push the smelt to the brink of extinction,” the AP reported. “In July, a key index of delta smelt abundance hit zero for the first time since the survey began in 1959. Researchers found a handful of smelt, but the number was too small to register on the population gauge.” Farmers have argued that too much fresh water has been lost trying to keep the fish’s population numbers robust.

On Friday

According to the Stockton Record, Judge Chang “granted a temporary restraining order preventing the State Water Resources Control Board from ‘taking any action’ against the West Side Irrigation District.” She wrote in her ruling that the curtailment letters “including the requirement that recipients sign a compliance certification confirming cessation of diversion, result in a taking of petitioners’ property rights without a pre-deprivation hearing.”

In addition, the 2015 curtailment letters were found to be “coercive in nature and go beyond the ‘informational’ purpose” that the board claimed.

The Associated press previously reported that the SWRCB “issued the curtailment notice on June 12 to 114 water users who hold rights dating back to 1903 and have nearly ironclad rights to take water from rivers and streams.” The last time senior water rights holders were told to stop pumping and irrigating from rivers was during a drought in the 1970s.

Stockton attorney Steve Herum, who represents a number of other water districts that also received water curtailment notices, said of the ruling, “It’s a complete victory.”

But the SWRCB issued a response to the ruling, alleging that the order “is limited to the parties in this case.”

“While the order finds fault with the language of the notice, the order states: ‘To be clear, [the Water Board and its staff] are free to exercise their statutory authority to enforce the Water Code as to any water user, including these Petitioners, if it deems them to be in violation of any provisions of the Water Code, so long as the bases for said action are not the Curtailment Letters.’

 

“Pursuant to section 1052 of the Water Code, unauthorized diversions during the drought emergency are subject to enhanced penalties of up to $1,000 per day and $2,500 per acre-foot of water diverted. Diversion of water when no water is available pursuant to a diverter’s water right constitutes an unauthorized diversion and a trespass under Water Code section 1052.  Any such enforcement action would occur only after notice and an opportunity for hearing pursuant to the Water Code.  This has been the consistent position of the State Water Board staff, and was specifically identified in the curtailment notices sent in May and June.”

Herum, however, told the Stockton Record that all water curtailment notices sent to water users are now “equally unconstitutional” under the ruling.

On Wednesday, the State Water Resources Control Board adopted new emergency regulations to protect endangered and threatened fish. Low flows in four tributaries of the Russian River cause “high temperatures, low oxygen levels and isolated pools of water that can kill fish,” such as the coho salmon and steelhead trout.

Starting July 3, roughly 13,000 properties in the watersheds of Dutch Bill Creek, Green Valley Creek, Mark West Creek and Mill Creek will be subject to “enhanced conservation measures” in addition to the existing statewide water restrictions. As reported by the Press Democrat, residents are subject to the following rural water rules:

• “No watering lawns, washing driveways and sidewalks, washing motor vehicles, filling or refilling decorative ponds and fountains, and no use of water in a fountain or water feature not part of a recirculating system.
• “No watering of landscapes (trees and plants, including edible plants) that causes runoff onto adjacent property or non-irrigated areas or within 48 hours after measurable rainfall.
• “Limits landscape watering to two days per week and only from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.
• “Sets no limit on use of graywater — from bathtubs, showers, bathroom washbasins, clothes washing machines and laundry tubs as well as captured rainwater — for lawn and landscape irrigation, washing motor vehicles and use in decorative ponds, fountains and other water features, except for prohibition of irrigation runoff or application within 48 hours after measurable rainfall.”

“This is a very extreme situation,” said Corinne Gray, a senior environmental scientist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “There are already fish dying in the streams.” Gray told the SWRCB that the fish merely required a “trickle of water” between pools on the four creeks.

Farm representatives attending the meeting claimed parts of the measure were regulatory overreach. Text in the emergency measure enforces these new regulations “regardless of water seniority.”

This kind of enforcement has led to lawsuits against SWRCB. Just this week, the Banta-Carbona Irrigation District challenged water restrictions imposed by the state board, the first of potentially many more suits to come.

It remains to be seen whether the state board has the right to overrule century-old rights to water.

Transforming landscaping

Following on Gov. Jerry Brown’s executive order mandating swift and sustained reductions in water usage, California regulators brought yet another type of consumption to heel. “The state Building Standards Commission voted to change development rules to reduce the demand for water,” the Associated Press observed. “Developers can meet the rules by planting shrubs and bushes instead of grass or installing slow-trickling valves instead of traditional sprinklers.”

Regulators expected the decision to bring significant savings — about 20 percent less across all California lawns. “Outdoor irrigation,” noted the AP, “accounts for roughly half of residential water use.” By the middle of June, residences, workplaces, schools and hospitals will all be subjected to the new strictures.

Riparian regulations

The curbs on thirsty lawns followed fast on sharp new demands imposed on historic farms by the State Water Resources Control Board. In an unprecedented move, a group of farmers recently offered to reduce their consumption by 25 percent relative to 2013 levels. Now, regulators have accepted the plan.

“The action applies only to so-called riparian rights holders, landowners whose property has direct access to a river or stream,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “By volunteering the cuts, Delta farmers avoid the risk of being hit with even larger cutbacks mandated by state water regulators.” According to the Times, the move brought one especially precious form of relief, taking away “the threat of lengthy and divisive litigation in a time of crisis.”

But not all farmers have accepted the new status quo. Some, reported the Contra Costa Times, hired attorneys “to assert that the state is defying statutes that honor their seniority. The water board’s order exceeds the scope of the state’s authority, the lawyers contend.” Farmers complained that they were pushed to offer a deal in order to avoid Draconian, potentially devastating penalties. And the state’s order that rights claimants show proof of property ownership has touched off an angry scramble for documentation.

“To defend their place in line, senior rights holders have rushed their ancient documents to analysts in the Division of Water Rights in Sacramento,” according to the Contra Costa Times. “Who, where and what rights will be curtailed in coming weeks remains to be determined, water officials say. Cutoffs will be based on flows in the watershed — and how long rights have been held.”

Local outrage

Meanwhile, in areas where cutbacks have already been adopted, some water agencies have moved ahead with even sharper penalties for current levels of use. San Jose Water, a private company supplying much of Silicon Valley with drinking water, followed the lead of nearby Santa Cruz and mandated steep new reductions in residential water consumption. As the San Jose Mercury News reported, “the company announced it would give all single-family residences — defined as any home that has its own water meter — monthly water allocations requiring a 30 percent reduction from 2013 levels. Apartments and most businesses won’t receive them.”

One detail in particular provoked a public outcry: “The 30 percent cut isn’t based on each home’s individual use. Instead, it’s calculated on the month-by-month average of all residential users in San Jose Water’s service area.” Company officials endured an hours-long hearing that drew some 350 dismayed locals, but remained — like officials across the state — largely unmoved. “It’s not like the spigot is going to go dry,” said Palle Jensen, senior vice president for regulatory affairs, according to the Mercury News. “You can still use water. But you will have to decide how.”

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” Governor Brown said at a press event in the Sierra Nevada mountains. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action. Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order mandating substantial water reductions across our state.”

To combat the state’s ongoing drought, the governor has ordered the State Water Resources Control Board to implement a 25 percent reduction in water use by local water agencies. He’s also calling on water districts to adopt conservation pricing, a streamlined permitting process for water projects and an investment in new water infrastructure technologies.

“People should realize we are in a new era,” the governor said. “The idea of your nice little green lawn getting watered every day, those days are past.”

Water everywhere, but only fraction from the sea

While conservation is the key element of the state’s short-term drought response, those latter provisions of the governor’s plan have many Californians turning to desalination as a promising long-term solution to the state’s water needs.

“The Governor’s Executive Order issued today is consistent with the policy goals established in the state’s Water Action Plan and clearly demonstrates his commitment to developing new local water supplies including seawater desalination,” said Scott Maloni, vice-president of Poseidon Water, a water development company that specializes in desalination.

For hundreds of years, sailors have found ways to remove salt and other impurities from the earth’s salt water and turn it into drinking water. Today, that process has gone high-tech at more than 17,000 desalination plants in 150 countries around the world. According to the International Desalination Association, more than 300 million people use approximately 21.1 billion gallons of water produced from desalination every day.

However, outside of the Middle East, where desalination is a vital component of the region’s water portfolio, desalination is responsible for just a fraction of the world’s drinking water.

“Even with all of the water in Earth’s oceans, we satisfy less than half a percent of human water needs with desalinated water,” Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and author of the book, The World’s Water, pointed out to Scientific American. “The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy.”

As of 2013, the California Department of Water Resources estimated that desalinated water cost $2,000 an acre foot, or double the price of water from other sources. But, the high energy production costs aren’t stopping enterprising companies from entering the desalination market, rather it’s a lengthy and bureaucratic permitting process.

Desalination plants battle lengthy permitting process

Next year, a $1 billion desalination plant in Carlsbad is expected to come online and produce 50 million gallons per day — after years of permitting battles with city governments and state agencies.

“They went through seven or eight years of hell to get here,” Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, told the San Jose Mercury News last year. “But they stuck it out. They got it done. If it succeeds, it will encourage others to try. And if it fails, it will have a chilling effect.”

Poseidon Water, which spearheaded the Carlsbad Desalination Project, is now working to gain final approvals from the California Coastal Commission on a desalination plant in Huntington Beach that would also produce 50 million gallons per day.

“A streamlined permitting process will significantly help our proposed Huntington Beach project become a reality,” said Maloni of Poseidon Water. “We are looking forward to bringing this project before the Coastal Commission for their approval this year and finally bringing a drought-proof water supply to millions of coastal residents.”

If the company gains its final discretionary approval from the Coastal Commission, the plant is scheduled to be operational by 2018. That’s not soon enough, given the state’s dwindling water supplies. Earlier this year, the Orange County Water District announced its intention to buy all of the 56,000 acre-feet of water produced by the plant.

“Desalination should be front and center”

The longer the drought persists, the more likely parched water agencies will be to add desalination plants as a component of their water portfolios.

“While conservation is a must, looking at ways to overcome the obstacles that have thwarted previous efforts on desalination should now be front and center in the water deliberations,” writes Joel Fox, editor of Fox & Hounds Daily. “Proposals to desalinate water from the Pacific Ocean have run into environmental concerns and cost issues. … The thinking on the cost issue is changing, however, because of the severity of the drought, the increased value of water, and potential energy resources to make the process work.”

In order to change thinking about desalination, it will require overcoming challenges from environmentalists, who view desalination as a precursor to more development.

“If you’re going to do something like desal, you want to make sure you’re doing everything you can in terms of conservation, water recycling, water re-use,” Susan Jordan of the California Coastal Protection Network told KQED, “and you don’t want unsustainable development that just perpetuates your problem, or the state’s problem.”

Although some lawmakers advocated new funds for projects that could pump up the Golden State’s access to potable water, and some municipalities have considered revisiting old methods to do so, the state’s demand has threatened to outstrip supply.

Under chairwoman Felicia Marcus, the State Water Resources Control Board has seen some success in curtailing water use. Nevertheless, the Associated Press reported, in a recent hearing Marcus and the board signaled a determination to restrict Californians’ consumption even more:

“The board has the sweeping power to define when water use is unreasonable, and it could eventually expand the definition to include using drinking water to maintain golf courses and cemeteries. Marcus said the board would likely take smaller steps first, such as prohibiting decorative outdoor water fountains.”

So far, the board has used mandatory data reporting requirements to measure the impact of restrictions on lawn watering and car washing that it first imposed over the summer. CBS Sacramento reported, “More than 400 local water departments must report their residential per-capita water monthly water use compared with the year before.”

As the network noted, although those restrictions were pegged to an April expiration date, the board indicated it will consider renewing them as part of the expanded rules that could include the new table water and hotel linen regulations.

Alternate approaches

Meanwhile, in the California Legislature, a new proposal has been floated to put more funds into capturing stormwater for residential use. As Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio confirmed, some stormwater funding already made its way into California’s landmark water bond, Proposition 1, which voters passed last November. The bond was a top priority for Gov. Jerry Brown.

But State Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, argued for an expansion of those plans. “We spend so much money and have such environmental impact by moving water around the state, when right in front of our noses there’s a lot of opportunity to capture it,” he told CPR.  “So we’re looking at best practices and trying to figure out new policies we can develop to make that happen.”

One approach that hasn’t made it onto the statewide agenda, however, shows more immediate promise: desalination. A relatively old technology, the process of purifying ocean water started returning to favor recently among some cities and scientists.

Coastal cities including Santa Barbara, Carlsbad and Huntington Beach have all turned their attention to using desalination plants, the Wall Street Journal reported. Though costly — desalination consumes a great deal of electricity — the plants have offered a fairly quick emergency fix in the past.

In Santa Barbara’s case, noted the Journal, “desalinated water will cost about a third more than the city’s imported freshwater supplies.” But “Mayor Helene Schneider said other options, including more conservation, have been exhausted for the city of 90,000.”

Daunting trend lines

Despite Californians’ success in approaching the state’s water conservation goals, drought projections have officials and analysts worried that the effort won’t be able to keep pace with the state’s long-term population growth.

Though on track to lower consumption 20 percent by 2020, the Sacramento Bee reported, water agencies determined that in 15 years use will have increased 16 percent. The California Department of Finance, the Bee noted, estimated that the state population will grow by 14 percent over the same period — rising to 44 million residents, demanding an additional 1 million acre-feet of water.