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Los Angeles Rejects Water Rationing Plan for Summer (Reuters)

Apr.08, 2009 in Public Works, Water Conservation, Water Crisis

(April 8, 2009, Reuters)

Despite dire warnings of water shortages due to prolonged drought, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday rejected a plan to ration water in the nation’s second-largest city for the first time in 18 years.

The unanimous 15-0 vote against the plan marked a surprise setback for Los Angeles water managers, who like their peers in cities throughout California were directed to cut water use 20 percent this year under a drought emergency proclaimed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The city must cut back its water use. There are no two ways about that,” said David Nahai, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation’s biggest municipal utility.

He said the council’s rejection stemmed not from disagreement over a need for mandatory conservation measures but from questions about how the plan would work and whether it amounted to a rate hike rather than a rationing scheme.

Under the plan adopted by the LADWP and endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, homes and businesses would pay a penalty rate — nearly double normal prices — for any water they used in excess of a reduced monthly allowance.

But Nahai insisted the measure was “revenue neutral,” designed entirely to encourage conservation.

The only other time such penalty pricing was imposed in Los Angeles was a year-long rationing system instituted in March 1991, at the height of California’s last statewide drought.

The current dry spell, now in its third year, is considered the worst to hit the state since the 1970s.

The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, one of the state’s chief sources of fresh surface water, remains below average despite a series of late-winter storms. Water storage in Sierra-fed reservoirs is below normal as well.

Complicating matters are federal limits on water pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in northern California, through which Sierra-fed drinking and irrigation supplies flow, in order to protect endangered fish species.

As a result, state water managers were forced to cut the amount of delta water slated for delivery to Los Angeles and other distant cities by 80 percent of usual this year.

The Los Angeles rationing plan was to have taken effect by June 1 barring City Council action to block it.

Nahai said the council’s rejection forces the DWP to start from scratch to devise a new, but similar plan while making greater efforts to explain the measure to local officials and the public.

(Original Article Here)