Residents slow to cut back on water use, despite pleas.
Customers asked to cut back, but savings goals haven’t been hit
As the sun began to rise over Santa Rosa’s Montgomery Village neighborhood, the headlights of a city work truck brought into view utility official Shiloh Jones’ target: wasted water.
Jones, part of Santa Rosa’s newly formed “water waste patrol,” had spotted a puddle on the sidewalk and traced it to a runaway irrigation system in a bed of pink roses.
“It looks like there’s a tear in the line,” Jones said, after hanging a notice of water misuse on the front door of the home one morning this week.
With California descending deeper into drought, Santa Rosa is getting serious about water use. So are other communities that are increasingly urging residents to conserve, sometimes asking for water reductions, sometimes mandating them. Gov. Gavin Newsom joined the cause last week, issuing a statewide plea for voluntary savings.
Still, amid the growing calls for conservation, the Bay Area’s initial response has been slow. Nearly a dozen of the region’s largest water suppliers that have sought cutbacks recently have come up short of their watersavings goals, according to water agency data reviewed by The Chronicle.
Some of these agencies, including East Bay Municipal Utility District and water departments in the cities of Napa and Healdsburg, even saw water use increase after they either requested or required customers to cut back, at least on the outset. To date, most agencies have gotten less than half of the 10% to 40% savings they’ve aimed for.
EBMUD, which has a goal of conserving 10% compared to 2020, reported a 5% reduction last month, following a 4% increase in May. The water department in Pleasanton saw a 3% drop last month, the first month it asked for a 10% reduction compared to last year. Nearby Livermore’s target and savings were similar.
While the push for reductions is only months old and water officials say it’s too soon to cite any longterm trend, the lagging conservation means further depletion of water supplies. It also comes at a time of year when water use is typically greatest, providing an opportunity for savings that may be hard to achieve later.
“Maybe water agencies can recover, maybe they can get back to normal, but there’s no guarantee,” said Newsha Ajami, director of Urban Water Policy at Stanford University’s Water in the West program. “The more they save now, the more they have if we’re in the same situation next year — or worse. If I were them, I’d be very concerned.”
California and the Bay Area are in the grip of backtoback dry years that rival almost any other twoyear period in modern times for the least amount of precipitation. Mountain snowpack, which provides much of the state’s water, has been tiny, and reservoirs across California are approaching some of their lowest levels.
Water agencies in the North Bay, where Newsom declared the state’s first drought emergency, were among the earliest to adopt conservation measures.
In midMay, Santa Rosa officials began asking residents for voluntary cuts to help achieve a citywide savings of 20% compared to the year before. The 174,000person service area recorded a 2% drop in water use in May and a 10% drop in June.
On June 29, the city upped the call, adopting a number of mandatory restrictions on outdoor landscaping, including bans on overwatering. The water waste patrol has helped keep residents in line, and while the city reserves the power to issue penalties, the crews have been successful with their warnings.
“I think we’re starting to see the community pay attention,” said Santa Rosa Water Director Jennifer Burke.
The Bay Area’s lackluster levels of conservation, according to water experts and utility officials, can be attributed to a number of likely factors.
First, recent bouts of warm weather have made it tough to curb water use. Second, the measures people took during the drought last decade were so substantial, including tearing out lawns and
“People want to do the right thing, but they want it to be fair.”
Felicia Marcus, former water official, on mandated cuts
installing waterefficient appliances, that savings now may be harder to come by. Third, some communities haven’t promoted the need for conservation, at least enough to break through the competing issues on people’s minds, including the pandemic.
“We’re seeing more coverage of the drought in the media, but it’s not the only thing being covered,” Stanford’s Ajami said.
Research by Ajami and her colleagues has suggested that news coverage is among the biggest drivers of conservation. Their models show that an increase of 100 droughtrelated articles in California over a twomonth period is linked to an 11% to 18% drop in water use.
Felicia Marcus, former chair of the State Water Resources Control Board who helped launch statewide water restrictions during the 20122016 drought, said conservation is most successful when it’s mandatory. As more water agencies move from voluntary to mustdo reductions, she said, the response is likely to improve, as it did when the state cutbacks last decade became law.
“There’s something helpful about it being mandated, because it levels the playing field,” Marcus said. “People want to do the right thing, but they want it to be fair.”
Newsom’s call for 15% savings by all Californians on July 8, while voluntary, should also inspire more people to action, Marcus said.
In the Bay Area, no major water agency is expected to run out of water soon, even if conservation continues to lag. However, water officials say that if the coming winter is dry, marking the third straight year of little rain and snow, supplies could be tested as soon as spring. Each agency has a different portfolio of water sources and a different timeline for trouble.
The Marin Municipal Water District is already considering construction of a 5mileplus pipeline across the RichmondSan Rafael Bridge to import water from other agencies next year. It’s a move from the playbook of the 197677 drought, when Marin County’s reservoirs similarly became critically low.
To prolong existing supplies, MMWD officials on May 1 sought a 40% reduction in water use, compared to average use from 2018 to 2020. They did this by enacting restrictions on outdoor activities across their 192,000person service area, such as limiting the number of days people may water their lawns.
The response was tepid, though it has improved. In May, water use was down 5% and in June, 19%. During the first week of July, savings increased to 22%, and on July 7, the district tightened its outdoor water regulations to boost savings even more.
“The conservation trends are encouraging, but we need to continue to save water especially as we move through these warm summer months,” said the district’s spokeswoman, Jeanne MarianiBelding.
To the north, Healdsburg began requiring 20% cuts in water use, compared to last year, on May 3 across its 12,000person service area. After consumption rose 5% that month, the city increased the call to 40% and followed up with notices of violation for some who fell short. In recent weeks, residents have achieved, and even surpassed, the target.
On the other side of the bay, the East Bay Municipal Utility District, the largest agency in the Bay Area to seek reductions, has seen less than half of the 10% savings it asked customers to voluntarily make 2½ months ago, compared to the prior year. District officials said hot weather in May made it tough to get the conservation numbers up in the 1.4 millionperson service area. They expect the numbers to improve.
Also in the East Bay, communities in the TriValley area, which have struggled to get customers to respond to a joint call for 10% voluntary water reductions at the end of May, increased their bid to 15% Monday. These include Pleasanton, Livermore and the Dublin San Ramon Services District.
In Sonoma County, the cities of Petaluma and Sonoma have also enacted water restrictions, initially voluntary but more recently made mandatory. Neither provided a full accounting of their savings to The Chronicle.
Back in Santa Rosa, Jones finished his shift on the water waste patrol by 6:30 a.m. He and his partner, Travis Guillory, had issued four notices of water misuse over a twohour period.
While the recipients of the warnings may not be happy waking up to the reprimand on their doors, Jones noted the upside of learning about water waste.
“It’s water that they’re paying for and not using,” he said, after finding a set of sprinklers shooting water into the street. “They can save money.”