Coping With Drought Lies In Adding, Not Saving, Water

To save a scarce resource, it generally makes sense to set a price that takes account of supply and demand. But very little about California's water market makes sense.

A state court of appeals ruled Monday that the Orange County city of San Juan Capistrano's tiered water rates violate the state constitution, which bars water agencies from charging more than the actual cost of a service.

The court said, in effect, the policy doesn't make much sense, but it had no choice.

“We are called upon to determine not what is the right – or even the more reasonable – approach … but what is the one chosen by the state's voters,” Judge William W. Bedsworth wrote for the court.

The upshot is that the Capistrano Water District can have tiered pricing, but the tiers “must still correspond to the actual cost of providing service at a given level of usage.”

The ruling's likely impact on Inland residents? None – at least for the time being.

But several Inland water districts, including the Rancho California Water District in Temecula, Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, the city of Corona, Riverside's Western Municipal Water District, the Eastern Municipal Water District in Perris and East Valley Water District in Highland use tiered pricing. Expect more litigation before long.

No wonder Jerry Brown isn't happy. “The practical effect of the court's decision is to put a straitjacket on local government at a time when maximum flexibility is needed,” read the governor's statement Monday. “My policy is and will continue to be: Employ every method possible to ensure water is conserved across California.”

Every method? Not really. Otherwise, the governor wouldn't have exempted agriculture and environmental uses from his recent order to cut statewide water consumption by 25 percent.

Arbitrary mandates and water rationing are what you get when you have an overly regulated market that only a handful of specialists can pretend to understand. Four years into a drought they had every opportunity to mitigate years ago, all state regulators and environmentalists can do is scold.

Some Californians have had just about enough of the lectures. A petition appeared on change.org over the weekend addressed to “Gov. Brown, Members of the California Legislature, Mayors of Cities in California and Directors.” The message: “Stop punishing California residents. The water problem is your fault!”

“We have done our part,” the petition reads. “We have installed water saving toilets, showerheads, sprinklers, faucets, etc. We have reduced our water consumption dramatically and are paying exorbitant fees for water and taxes. Enough is enough!”

“On the other hand,” the petitioners continue, “you have done nothing to prepare the state for water shortages and increased population. Blaming the weather is flat-out irresponsible. You had plenty of warning. Our water system is old and not capable of sustaining growth or lack of rain.”

As of noon Wednesday, the change.org petition had accumulated a little more than 58,000 signatures, including mine. The goal is 75,000. That isn't very many in a state of 38 million, but it suggests that serious discontent is beginning to percolate.

The solutions on offer range from the sensible to the far-fetched.

Desalination would make the most sense, even if our current regulatory climate makes the technology difficult to use. But to dismiss desalination as a pipe dream ignores the experience of other countries with similar water challenges.

In 2005, for example, Israel embarked upon an aggressive desalination effort. About 35 percent of Israel's drinking water today comes from desalination. That figure is projected to double by 2050.

As it happens, Israel is in the midst of a record drought. Desalination has made the Israeli water crisis negligible.

Israel is a small country, of course. But California has an abundance of coastline. What we lack is an abundance of courage. The lesson of this drought may be that it's past time to throw off the straitjacket of 40-year-old environmentalist thinking and embrace solutions befitting the Golden State in the 21st century.

This piece originally appeared in Riverside Press Enterprise

This piece originally appeared in Riverside Press Enterprise