Californians slash water use, still short of mandatory goal
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Californians are using less water, but they’ll have to conserve a lot more to reach the mandatory drought cuts taking effect this month, according to the latest numbers released on Tuesday.
California residents reduced overall water use by 13.5 percent in April compared with the same month in the benchmark year of 2013, water officials said.
That’s the second-best conservation achievement since state officials started closely tracking water use more than a year ago, but it fell short of the 25 percent cut that Gov. Jerry Brown made mandatory for cities and towns as of June 1.
“Local communities are stepping up in a way they weren’t before, and I’m hoping that’s why we are starting to see the uptick” in conservation, said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the state Water Resources Control Board.
“The real challenge is, we really have to step it up for the summer months,” Marcus said. “If we miss the summer, we are toast.”
This year’s Sierra Nevada snowpack, which feeds the state’s rivers, was the lowest on record — a grim image that served as Brown’s backdrop when he announced unprecedented conservation measures on April 1.
April’s best conservers included Santa Rosa, a city of 170,000 people north of San Francisco, which reported a 32 percent drop in April compared with the same month in 2013. The city offered a host of programs to achieve savings, such as paying residents to reduce 52 football fields’ worth of lawn and giving away 50,000 lowflush toilets since 2007.
Along with offering some modest rebate programs for water conservation, Bakersfield, a working-class city surrounded by farms and oil rigs, was finding it difficult to get the word out to everybody about saving, City Manager Alan Tandy said.
The southern California coast, a region including Los Angeles and San Diego, cut just 9 percent in April, compared with a 20 percent reduction in the San Francisco Bay area and 24 percent in the Sacramento area.
Among cities of 40,000 or more, the steepest reduction of 45 percent was reported by the water company serving Livermore. The worst was Escondido, reporting a 20 percent increase.
Starting this month, each community has a mandatory water-reduction target, with some ordered to cut back as much as 36 percent.
Water districts missing their targets face fines of up to $10,000 a day once June numbers are in, although a far more likely outcome will be stateordered changes in local regulations, like toughening limits on lawn-watering.