Making conservation a California way of life

Symposium presentation looks at the Brown administration’s proposed framework for water conservation

After several years of drought, in May of 2016, Governor Brown issued Executive Order B-37-16 which directed the State Water Board, the Department of Water Resources, the Department of Food and Agriculture, the Public Utilities Commission, and the California Energy Commission to take actions focusing on using water wisely, eliminating water waste, strengthening local drought resilience, and improving ag efficiency and planning. The agencies, working with stakeholder input, released a framework in April of 2017 that outlined the actions the individual and collective implementation actions and recommendations for all items contained in Executive Order to achieve the goal of making conservation a way of life in California.

The framework identifies several actions, some of which can be implemented using existing authorities such as permanent prohibition of wasteful practices and reducing water supplier leaks and water losses; others, such as strengthening standards, establishing water use targets, and strengthening urban water shortage contingency planning, will require legislative action.

Several bills were introduced in this last session, and work progressed on a package of bills that focused on long-term conservation and drought planning. The bills were heard in Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee on July 11; the Committee adjourned with Chair Sen. Robert Herzberg saying that a group of legislators, stakeholders, and Brown administration representatives will work over the legislative break to craft a final package of bills with the final bill package likely to include three Assembly bills and a Senate bill. The legislature will reconvene on August 21. (Click here for coverage from ACWA’s Water News.)

So what is in the framework? At the Chino Basin Water Conservation District’s symposium on Making Conservation a California Way of Life held in June of this year, Erik Ekdahl, Director of the Office of Research, Planning and Performance at the State Water Board, gave this presentation on what the framework holds for urban water suppliers.

Erik Ekdahl began by giving some background. Lake Oroville is the last piece of the State Water Project; it was completed in 1968. At the time, California’s population was just under 20 million people. Since that time, California’s population has increased by 20 million people. Looking forward to 2050, the population will likely increase by another 20 million people.

There have also been significant land use changes. Vast swaths of California have been converted from essentially riparian or non-irrigated natural vegetation to urban environments where people use water every day. Since California is a hot dry place in the summer, and so agriculture requires a significant amount of irrigation. On top of that, there is climate change to contend with. In 2014,the snowpack was about 30% of the long-term average; in 2015, only 5% of the long-term average.

“Looking at tree ring records and other paleo-climate data, researchers at Berkeley and Stanford and other places figure that 2015 was probably the lowest snowpack in anywhere from 500 and 1300 years, and that the three year period between 2015 and 2012 was likely the driest continuous three year period in 1300 years,” Mr. Ekdahl said. “So that’s a significant drought and we shouldn’t undersell just how severe that drought was.”

“We talk about average water years,” he said, presenting a graph showing precipitation plotted against the Palmer Drought Severity Index. “Where it’s above the blue line, we have normal or wet conditions; where it’s below the line, we have drought or drier conditions. You can see we tend to swing back and forth between wet and dry, wet and dry. And the last couple of years were really significantly drier. They were much below average, much below the drought threshold.”

California has often been compared to Australia and their millennial drought; it lasted ten years with one kind of wet year in between. “We’ve talked about the last five or six years as one drought, but if you look a little bit farther back than that, our experience in California is not all the dissimilar from what they saw in Australia,” he said. “We had several dry years in the late 2000s. We had a couple of slightly normal years in 2010 and 2011, and then another set of very severe drought years.”

It is all going to get worse with climate change, he pointed out. “If we look at what climate projections mean for California, it means hotter temperatures, more frequent and longer drought, and more severe. And so all of this plays into the background of how we manage water resources and what it means to conserve water and manage water in the state of California.”

Since 2017, the Governor has issued several executive orders requiring the Board to pass a set of emergency regulations; those emergency regulations changed over time and with the severity of the drought. “We started in 2014 by requiring mandatory reporting that urban water suppliers had to submit to the board; we called for voluntary actions,” he said. “As the drought worsened into 2015, the Governor issued an executive order that called for mandatory 25% cutbacks. We did that by tiering different water uses, based on how much individual suppliers were using on a per capita basis. Those tiers ranged anywhere from about 4% cutbacks, all the way up to 36% cutbacks.”

“2016 was a slightly better water year; we got a bit more rain in March that kind of saved everything for us as it actually started off pretty dry,” he said. “In Southern California, February 2016 was the single driest and hottest February on record. There was essentially no rain, and the temperatures were in the 90s and 100s for most of the month of February, and things looked even worse than 2015. Then all of the sudden flood gates opened and we kind of came up close to average but not quite.”

This year is a completely different story, he said. “It’s a record water year in Northern California; for the Central and Southern Sierra, it’s not quite record levels of precipitation but very close. Snowpack was far above average, although interestingly, not record levels, so while we’ve set records for volume of water, we didn’t set a record for snowpack. That’s tracking with what we’re expecting to see as climate change manifests more severely. Maybe the same amount of precipitation, maybe even more in some cases, but instead of falling as snow, it’s going to fall as rain.”

The drought emergency was lifted in 2017 as clearly there was no need to keep the mandatory cutbacks in place; however, the Governor’s executive order that rescinded the state of emergency did direct the board to continue reporting and to continue the prohibitions that have been in place for certain wasteful water practices.

How did Californians respond? Mr. Ekdahl presented a graphic showing urban water production, noting the dark blue background is baseline 2013 water use. “You can see overtime the 2014 voluntary cutbacks achieved about an 8 to 10% overall reduction,” he said. “In 2015 when the 25% was in place, we saw a dramatic decrease in overall water use, about a 24% reduction from 2013. That was a tremendous success and that’s really reflective of the people of California responding to the call, recognizing that the drought was severe, and to the water suppliers who messaged and helped push this concern that the drought was real and conservation was a way of life that we needed to adopt.”

Since the standards were relaxed, water use has crept up a little bit, but so far, Californians are continuing to save a lot of water. “We’ve been tracking at about 20% reduction relative to 2013 for the last couple of months,” he said. “By all indications, they are going to keep tracking pretty well. So, Californians have responded. People are conserving water at record levels.”

So where do we go from here? Executive Order B-3716 was issued by the Governor in May of 2016, and it had directives issued at five state agencies: The State Water Resources Control Board, the Department of Water Resources, Department of Food and Agriculture, Public Utilities Commission, and the California Energy Commission. The executive order contained four directives and 13 actions within those directives that really focused on using water more wisely, eliminating water waste, strengthening local drought resilience, and improving agricultural efficiency and planning.

The executive order required the state agencies named in that executive order to put together a framework report and submit it to the Governor. The framework report was released in draft in December of 2016 and in final form on April 7, 2017.

One of the actions in the Executive Order asked the state agencies to develop a framework for developing new water use targets, based on efficiency standards for indoor water use, outdoor water use, and CII or Commercial, Industrial and Institutional water use; those targets were required to exceed the conservation levels achieved by SBx7-7 or 20×2020. There are other elements such as improving data collection and data messaging throughout those directives as well, he noted.

Standards and targets

Mr. Ekdahl then went into more detail about the standards and targets. “Those are a fundamental shift on how we ‘ve looked at water at the supplier level, how we’ve tracked water use, and what we consider an efficient or reasonable amount of water to be used,” he said.

The conservation framework really focuses on efficiency and on budget based targets; it also has a standardized approach, he said. “20×2020 was an immensely successful program,” he said. “It really got Californians thinking about water conservation in a way that we hadn’t before, but there are multiple baselines in 20×2020 which makes comparisons between individual agencies very difficult.”

The framework is customized to local conditions unique to each supplier; there’s a lot of local flexibility, Mr. Ekdahl explained. “One of the things that we heard during the mandatory cutbacks when we had the emergency regulations, was that mandatory across the board cuts weren’t fair and equitable,” he said. “So the framework in part is a response to this message that we heard from the suppliers that said that across the board cuts don’t make sense. ‘If we’ve already invested in local efficiency, if we’ve already invested in local conservation, why should we be asked to make continued cuts going forward when we’ve already done all that work.’”

20×2020 also had multiple baselines; there were concerns with equity and effectiveness, and even some cases where there were suppliers that really didn’t have to do anything under 20×2020. “The framework has a lot of local flexibility, and I don’t want to deemphasize that point,” he said. “20×2020 really did ask the supplier to look at what worked best for them and then implement it. I think the framework does that also.”

The approach laid out in the framework ask the supplier to develop efficiency-based water budgets that have three components: indoor water use, outdoor water use, and water system loss. CII use is not part of that water budget, he noted.

“There are infinite pathways to compliance,” said Mr. Ekdahl. “What the framework proposes is the whole supplier gets a volumetric target; how that target is reached is completely up to the supplier. The state doesn’t have any role in dictating how compliance is reached. There’s a uniform methodology for determining the targets, so while the targets are still flexible and it’s based on local climate and local population, the methodology is uniform for everybody. There are no baselines, there are no mandatory reductions, and there’s state compliance assistance.”

The water use target itself is the sum of three components:

Indoor residential use: based on a standard gallons-per day that is multiplied by the population, multiplied by the number of days per year.
Outdoor irrigation: a function of how much irrigation or irrigable landscape is in the service area; that is unique to each supplier. It is calculated for each supplier by the Department of Water Resources.
System loss component: SB 555, which passed last year, requires the State Water Board to adopt standards based on input and data collected by the Department of Water Resources.

There’s an important difference between a standard and a target, Mr. Ekdahl said. “The standards are the individual measures of efficiency,” he said. “What is an efficient level of indoor use? It’s not the same as your target; the target is the sum of all these different components, rolled up in the service area. The standards are the unique metrics where the state has gone in and defined efficiency.”

Indoor residential target

The framework is proposing an efficiency standard of 55 gallons per capita per day as a starting point. It is based on population, so if there are 100 people in the district, the indoor residential budget component would be calculated as 100 people x 55 gallons per day x 365 days per year.

Although the standards for indoor residential is proposed to be 55 gallons per person per day, the framework allows for state and local entities to look at whether or not it is an appropriate starting point.

“Maybe you have swamp coolers that use a lot of evaporative water, so maybe in your local service area, this needs to go up,” Mr. Ekdahl said. “Maybe you have a large number of transient vacation rental homes and you need to adjust that number accordingly based on when people are there and when they are not. That can all be done as part of the framework because the framework calls for intense level of public interaction and stakeholder involvement long before any of these targets are actually set in regulation or by statute.”

Outdoor irrigation target

For the outdoor standards, the framework proposes a fraction of reference of evapotranspiration. As an example, the standard for Northern California is proposed to be 0.8 of the reference evapotranspiration, which is the volume of water needed to grow grass and keep it green throughout the year. “The standard would be, how much do we think you actually need to keep your grass alive and well? You would multiply that by the landscape area and you would get a volume of water and a few other widgets and numbers in there, too,” he said.

The Department of Water Resources will provide the landscape area data. The Department is currently engaged in a pilot project working with two suppliers with results to be released over the summer. There will be a public meeting in which they’ll discuss what the found as a result of the pilot studies, and how they will roll that out for all 410 urban water suppliers going forward. “It’s focused on residential/metered irrigation,” said Mr. Ekdahl. “We’re not talking about CII, nothing that isn’t hooked onto a dedicate irrigation account. This is only really focused on places where we can figure out what individual area is using a meter.”

System loss standards

The system loss standards are based on the SB 555 process where the board will set standards based on data collected by the Department of Water Resources through ongoing water loss audit program. The American Water Works Association has been funded $3.5 million to help facilitate some of these audits. That process is ongoing. The standards are being adopted through the normal regulatory process. “That standard will be volumetrically based, but there’s many different ways that we could do it,” he said. “We could do it by population. We could do it by number of service connections. We could do it by miles of system conveyance in this service area. That all has to be worked out by 2020.”

CII use

CII is not included in the volumetric targets, but the framework does discuss standards for CII in the terms of best management practices. “We don’t want to affect economic output, we don’t want to affect systems that are designed to use a certain volume or feet of water; we just want to focus on performance measures, looking at those that might be using too much,” he said. “Things that help identify people that are using a lot of water, and then ask them to identify if they can reduce water use. We’re also talking about potentially classifying CII accounts. Right now in many service areas but not all, the different types of CII use is not categorized or characterized in any way.”

Long term standards and reporting

The state will develop long-term standards working with the public, stakeholders, and technical experts; the standards are to be adopted as regulations. Revision to those standards can occur every 5 years if recommended by the Department of Water Resources.

The Executive Order directs the Board to make the monthly reporting by suppliers initiated during the drought permanent. The Board is working on regulations to do that; it’s a separate process, he said. “But in terms of the framework, the Department would continue to collect plan data – urban water management plans, water shortage contingency plans, the agricultural plans, as well as the annual efficiency/target reporting, that will all go to the Department.”

Compliance and meeting targets

There have been a lot of concerns expressed about the state stepping in and issuing regulations or orders that would require stakeholders to do things with their own flexible and independent water supply, but Mr. Ekdahl said that isn’t the case.

“The target that we’re proposing is based on the supplier scale, so it doesn’t require the supplier to go down to the individual parcel level and regulate parcel to parcel to parcel; it just says, what is your supplier’s level, what’s your target based on those three components, and it all rolls up into one number, and that’s what your goal would be – not immediately, but by 2026,” he said.

“Because you’re only looking at the supplier area, there are infinite ways to comply,” he continued. “You can focus on whatever approach works best for you. Maybe you want to focus on plumbing rebates, maybe you want to focus on system loss, maybe you want to focus on landscape conversion – there’s any number of ways you can approach how you meet your target. The state has no say in how that occurs.”

However, the framework does propose a role for the State Water Board and the Department of Water Resources to help ensure people do meet that target. The role of the State Water Board would be similar to what is was during the emergency regulations where they worked with suppliers. “In the three years of emergency regulations, we only took real action on four suppliers,” Mr. Ekdahl said. “Two of them just wrote us a check for $60,000 and the other two, we worked with them to develop an alternative compliance schedule that focused on education and outreach. Our goal is not to penalize people; our goal is to achieve the target, so without some sort of motivation behind it, the thought is people will have more difficulty in meeting the targets. So it’s a very similar construct to SGMA for groundwater management where locals have the first crack at it, but if local efforts aren’t successful, there needs to be an effort at the state level to help protect that resource.”

“Furthermore, suppliers have until 2026 or nine years to hit these targets,” he said. “Throughout that time period, there will be technical assistance from the Department of Water Resources, technical assistance from local stakeholders and other efforts. This is all geared again with helping people meet that target, not with penalizing people.”

In order to meet that target, suppliers can choose to offer rebates, use conservation rate structures, customer and system leak repair, ordinance and codes, education and outreach – it’s all up to you, Mr. Ekdahl said. None of this is mandated by the state.

Stakeholder involvement

The framework calls for significant stakeholder involvement. The administration also identifies a dedicated CII technical workgroup and an urban advisory group, along with public input discussions during the entire regulatory process.

Timing for completion

The state would begin standard development after passage of the legislation. The Board would adopt standards around 2021. Suppliers would begin to calculate their targets in 2022 and begin reporting to the Department in 2022. Suppliers would be required to meet their targets by 2026.

Basic true or false questions

Mr. Ekdahl said that since there’s been a lot of confusion about what the framework means, he would pose some true or false questions:

1-The framework is too complicated, and the state isn’t prepared to implement it.

“That’s false,” he said. “The framework actually isn’t that complicated. It seems complicated because there are a lot of different components to it, there’s math involved, and you start multiplying by population and people start scratching their heads a little bit, but what does this actually mean? But if we look at other places that have instituted budget based targets, most of them started without even having the landscape area data. They just made a guess and they went forward.”

“The timeline that we’re proposing where we’re not only going to implement the standards until 2021, gives us four years to work on all these technical details to put together the technical landscape area data, to work out the bugs and the kinks, and to think about the variances, so that in 2022, when reporters are ready and they need to start reporting, the state is ready, we’ve worked out what this actually means, we’ve worked out the flow, and we’re there and available to help people through technical assistance and compliance assistance meet their targets by 2025.”

2-Suppliers need parcel-level landscape data to implement the framework.

“That’s false,” he said. “What you need is the supplier level data that will be provided by the Department of Water Resources. Now to be fair, we have had people say that they want to verify what the Department comes up with, and I think that is a valid initial response. However, I’ve seen some previews of their landscape-level information, and they are talking about errors of 0.5 to 2%. You’d be hard pressed to get any more accurate than that.”

“Right now, there are people that do this landscape measurement, but everyone does it a little differently. Some people include irrigated and some people include irrigable … When you have 70 different suppliers using 70 different methods, it’s going to create an air of confusion, because everyone is using a different method.”

3- The water board is will take your water right.

“That’s also false,” he said. “The water code already has language that basically says water saved through conservation cannot be lost through non use, and that language isn’t going away. That language isn’t changing, and in fact some of the draft framework language further emphasizes that if you save water during conservation or through conservation, that is not an avenue for the board to take or change your water right. That water right that you’ve perfected or that you’re working on perfecting which can take decades in some cases is still there and it’s still yours and we’re not going to change it.”

4-Implements a key resilience strategy and is it flexible for suppliers.

“True,” he said. “What we think the framework does is take a uniform approach. It talks about what is an efficient use of water, and it implements that at a statewide scale while recognizing the unique characteristics of every one of California’s unique water suppliers. Those characteristics include different populations, different makeup of the populations, some may have different water needs because there are medical needs and you’re running extra dialysis machines within your service area, we’ve heard that come up a couple of times. We can recognize unique landscape features. Horses – we’ve heard about how livestock can be incorporated into the landscape area. We can accommodate all of these, we can figure out how they work, we can figure out what it means to have a reasonable and efficient use of water so that when the next drought comes, we’re not faced with a mandatory across the board cutback. What we can look at is say, are you efficient? Are you using water efficiently? And if so, then it will be hard-pressed to push down or promulgate additional cutbacks during a drought or a drought emergency.”

Takeaways

Mr. Ekdahl then wrapped it up with his takeaways. “Conservation is not a drought response, it’s a key management strategy,” he said. “We need to look at conservation for how we manage water. Most people are already. The framework recognizes the efforts that locals have made to achieve their own level of conservation and conservation efficiency. The framework approach is equitable, it’s flexible, and it can be done. We can do this; we have nine years to do it.”

“Stakeholders and the public are deeply integrated,” he continued. “One of the concerns we’ve heard is that the state agencies are just going to go into their ivory tower in the big Cal EPA building and we’re not going to talk to anybody, we’re just going to set these and then push these down people’s throats. That’s not what the framework calls for, and I don’t think we’d be successful if we even tried to do that in the first place. We want stakeholders involved because we won’t be able to do this otherwise.”

“Conservation is often the most cost effective approach to extending or developing new supplies, and the framework gives more authority to locals on how to best achieve targets and manage supply. There are infinite approaches to compliance, there are infinite approaches to meeting your target.”

“And so with that … “

QUESTION AND ANSWER HIGHLIGHTS

Question: Could you give us an outline of what the State Water Board is thinking about agriculture, who uses the most water?

“First in terms of the framework, where the framework did require some additional agricultural water management plans, or AWMP elements, better reporting,” Mr. Ekdahl replied. “The State Board is not really involved in those AWMPs. It really goes to the Department of Water Resources who takes that data and works with it, but that’s not to say that the State Board isn’t deeply involved in looking at agriculture and how efficient water is used there.”

“I think the most significant effort there is with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act or SGMA,” he continued. “SGMA is a multi-agency joint effort; the Department of Water Resources is really taking the lead in SGMA but the State Board plays an enforcement backstop role, much the same as we described here where if local efforts aren’t successful, then the state can step in. SGMA is going to require that groundwater basins come up with a sustainability plan by 2020 or 2022. That plan goes to DWR for review and the plan has to describe how that basin will be sustainable managed in 20 years, and that’s going to be a fundamental change for many agricultural basins, particularly in the Central Valley.”

“The basins here are largely adjudicated and are exempt from the SGMA process, largely because they’ve gone through a court-mandated SGMA process already where they look at how the basin’s going to be kept roughly sustainable. But in the Central Valley, there are places where groundwater elevations have dropped by 600 feet over the last 20 years. It’s been largely due to groundwater overdraft or lack of surface water supplies and those areas are going to have to figure out how to stop that level of overdraft going forward.”

“There’s a lot of work going on,” said Mr. Ekdahl. “There are some flow objectives that the State Board is looking at in the Central Valley through our water quality control plan. They are also looking at flow objectives for the Sacramento tributaries as well, so there’s a lot of efforts that there that are looking at how agriculture and water use are going to work together going forward.”

Question: When you’re setting your targets, here in Southern California you’re going to be setting targets on our past habits. How can you ensure us here in Southern California that you’re going to set targets that are equitable when people in Northern California don’t have meters because it takes a while for that culture to get in place?

“Just to clarify, we’re not going to set the targets based on past use,” he said. “That’s one of the old constructs under 20×2020 where you look at a baseline that went back 5, 10, or 15 years, and there were multiple ways you can calculate your baseline. What the framework proposes is to calculate your target based entirely on efficiency standards, so it wouldn’t look at what you’ve done in the past. It would say the efficiency standard for indoor is 55 gpcd, the efficiency standard for outdoor is 0.8 reference evapotranspiration, the efficiency standard for water loss is whatever metric you guys come up with, and that all gets summed up into your target. So if you’ve made past investments, that should already be reflected, you should already be closer or meeting those efficiency targets already.”

“When we’ve done some preliminary analysis, it suggests that many suppliers, if we use the efficiency standards called out in the framework, would already be meeting their targets,” he said. “If you’ve done that work here, you’re meeting your target already, the level of work you’d have to do going forward would be relatively little. I think it balances that playing field.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION …

Sign up for daily email service and you’ll never miss a post!

Sign up for daily emails and get all the Notebook’s aggregated and original water news content delivered to your email box by 9AM. Breaking news alerts, too. Sign me up!