(CN) — In 2018, the California Legislature passed parallel bills to improve urban water conservation. Now, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests the laws should be modified to make the regulations less complicated, less challenging and costly to implement — and less onerous for lower-income households.
Senate Bill 606 and Assembly Bill 1668 aim to conserve water in the face of drought — which the state has experienced in 9 of the past 11 years — decreased snowpacks and climate change.
Other state plans call for more water recycling, desalinating ocean water, stormwater capture and expanding above- and below-ground storage capacity, all of which the state has plowed a billion dollars into over the last decade.
The bills require the State Water Resources Control Board to draft policies that specifically target reductions in urban water use — the water that 95% of residents use for drinking, bathing and watering their lawns.
Although urban water use only accounts for 10% of the state’s annual water use — 40% is used by agricultural irrigation and 50% goes to environmental purposes like wetlands and wild and scenic rivers — and daily per capita water use in the state has declined by 37% since 1990 thanks to prior legislation and conservation efforts, the legislation requires suppliers to create a “water use objective” to measure customer conservation. Beginning in 2027, the state could tack penalties onto suppliers that lag on water-use targets.
The legislative analyst estimates statewide water use must be reduced by 14% to meet targets by 2035. But not all Californians would be affected in the same way.
About 18% of water suppliers won’t need to make any reductions in current water use under the plan. The same number will have to reduce water use by 10%. One in five will have to reduce their water use by 30%.
Inland areas, like the Tulare Lake region in Central California in the state’s agricultural heartland will have to reduce their water use by 31%. Suppliers in the eastern portion of San Diego and Imperial counties will have to reduce their water use by 27% percent. In the eastern part of the state, suppliers will have to reduce their water use by 33 to 34%.
On the North Coast though, suppliers won’t have to reduce their water use at all. The Central Coast and the San Francisco Bay region will only have to reduce their water use by 1 to 3%.
To meet some of these water reduction goals, water suppliers would try things like incentivizing customers to fix water leaks, replace inefficient appliances with more efficient ones, and convert lawns to landscapes that use less water. The legislative analyst advises against such a path.
“Mandating that customers take on major projects, such as lawn conversions, likely is not a practical or feasible approach. To comply with the earlier 20x2020 requirements, many suppliers created voluntary rebate programs and customers responded," the analyst wrote in its report. "However, that means many customers — particular early adopters — have already replaced appliances and fixtures (and to a lesser degree, turf) with higher efficiency alternatives and suppliers therefore will not be able to gain much more savings from them. Suppliers could have more difficulty convincing the remaining customers to modify their residences and behaviors, particularly lower‑income customers who are less able to afford to make significant changes as well as customers who are less motivated by incentives."
The analyst said water suppliers could increase their rates to force people to conserve, which would disproportionately affect lower income people.
“In a recent study of Santa Cruz County, Stanford University researchers found that during the multiyear drought that ended in 2016, increased water rates and drought surcharges raised water bills for lower‑income customers while simultaneously lowering bills for higher‑income customers (who were able to reduce their water use to more than offset higher charges),” the analyst wrote.
To make up for revenue reductions from selling less water, water suppliers could also be enticed to increase customer rates, which, again, would hurt lower income Californians, the analyst said.
Additionally, the new regulations will cost the state an estimated tens of billions of dollars from 2025 to 2040 and only save about 440,000 acre-feet of water — about 1% of the state's total water use, the analyst said.
“These concerns do not lead us to recommend that the Legislature abandon the water conservation efforts it initiated through SB 606 and AB 1668. Rather, we think this period before State Water Resources Control Board adopts the final regulations offers the Legislature an opportunity to make some changes to simplify compliance, ease implementation burdens, and lower associated costs — and thereby help maximize the potential benefits of pursuing water efficiency improvements,” the analyst wrote.
Ideas to improve the legislation include reducing its complexity, reducing the burden on lower-income customers, considering how new and existing state conservation programs could support conservation and developing a strategy of how water savings can be tracked.
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