California Water News Daily Your Source For Water News in California
State Achieves 23.9 Percent Savings of 25 Percent Goal
Drought-plagued Californians continued their water conservation efforts in February but came up just short of achieving Gov. Jerry Brown’s first-ever mandatory statewide drought rules imposed last April. California’s urban residents used 23.9 percent less water this February when compared to the same month in 2013.
From June 2015, when Gov. Brown’s mandate was enacted, through February, 1.19 million acre-feet of urban water was saved. This was 96 percent of the expected 1.24 million acre-feet according to statistics released Monday by the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB).
Despite the missed target SWRCB Chair, Felicia Marcus, praised residents saying “Californians rose to the occasion, reducing irrigation, fixing leaks, taking shorter showers and saving our precious water resources in all sorts of ways,” she said. Marcus called it an “enormous effort.”
Water experts claim that weather has been the primary reason for the missed target. El Nino’s uneven performance left drier than anticipated conditions in Southern California, and left the Southland with low reservoirs and rainfall at just half-way toward its historical averages. Conversely, the Southern California sunshine has remained abundant.
Marcus acknowledged the situation saying, “There was a miserable February. It was hot, and folks couldn’t bear to see everything die so they turned the sprinklers on.” Regarding water savings, she continued saying, “I definitely would have like more. Southern California, because of its sheer size, can drive the percentages.”
February was the last month of the mandatory 25 percent savings. Californians have now been directed to use at least 20 percent less versus the same period in 2013.
In spite of the commendable state-wide water conservation age-old tensions between California’s north and south have begun to surface again. With the state’s largest reservoirs in Northern California brimming but Southern California having received little precipitation since the October 2015 start of the “rain year”, plus just a near-average year for the state’s snowpack, the uneven amount of rain throughout the state is leading to cries for the need to relax mandatory restrictions – or not.
The state water board may levy less stringent water conservation rules after they meet on April 20; Marcus has said they will relax mandatory conservation goals on water companies, water districts and cities. The largest reductions will be in Northern California where El Nino has had a far great impact.
The SWRCB initially issued targets to water providers based on how much water they used per capita. Low use communities like Hayward and Santa Cruz had an eight percent goal whereas Beverly Hills and the high desert town of Bakersfield had 36 percent targets.
“Our emergency authority is something we should use judiciously,” Marcus said recently. She added, “We are certainly open to adjusting those tiers for people.” She hinted that even areas that have received torrents of water won’t have their targets reduced to zero. Speculation is that a four percent reduction is likely to be the lowest target for water inundated parts of Northern California.
Marcus said, “We may have a baseline conservation number that we ask everybody to do to keep the ‘We’re all in this together’ attitude. One average year does not mean that we can forget about saving water. We don’t want to let our guard down.”
