The Costliness of Water Rationing, David Zetland and Water Police in California (LeakBird)
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Aguanomics water virtuoso David Zetland recently did a 26-minute interview with Bloomberg Radio that’s well worth listening to. Among a myriad of thoughtful points, one caught my attention in particular: The costliness of water rationing.
Zetland was referring to a tack Santa Barbara took in the 80’s during another big California drought, whereby they jacked the cost of water via increasing block or tiered water rates. You get the first block at a cheap price, then pay significantly more for the next blocks. We have this in San Francisco, and it’s becoming popular among municipalities all across the country. At one point, customers were paying twelve times the original block in Santa Barbara, and this got people’s attention. It worked, essentially.
In other words, instead of the city rationing water, “which is very costly, they could still get water at a price,” Zetland said.
“So you use a price mechanism instead of saying you can’t water your lawn Tuesday and Thursday?” asked the interviewer in response.
“Right, those kinds of command and control mechanisms are ridiculous because you have to run around watching everybody,” Zetland said. “You get a ticket for washing your car Tuesday, when, in fact, it’s legal on a Wednesday. And it’s not like you’re going to wash your car everyday.”
This idea, that water rationing is truly costly, hit me like a ton of bricks. A couple of weeks ago we heard about the water police trolling Los Angeles neighborhoods. We all know that it costs a lot to have them doing that. That’s why I completely agree with Zetland. Pricing is a much more effective means of controlling water usage. I mean, how is an already basically bankrupt state like California going to be able to afford water rationing on top of it all?
However, it would be an interesting study in and of itself to do a cost analysis of water rationing in a city like San Francisco. Does anyone have any good studies they can point me to, or done any research already into this?
We can expect rationing in California almost across the board this coming year, due to 85% snowpack in the Sierras and a host of other convergences ushering in the perfect storm. Perhaps it’d be better if we just jacked the rates up even further.
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Abendigo Reebs is the VP of Business Development for LeakBird Industries LLC in San Francisco, CA. He may be reached by email at ben@leakbird.com
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January 25th, 2009 at 9:57 am
[...] intervention in markets. It’s refreshing to see a Berkeley-habitating PhD, as in Mr. Zetland, come out against water rationing, against local and state intervention in water [...]
February 7th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
[...] Rates/ Cost/ Price: Water is too cheap. It’s a monopoly (this ties into#4) that’s regulated to be too low in price. Prices [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Get a pipeline from the Columbia River to Southern California. Come on we’re ALL responsible for caring for this planet. That means keeping it as beautiful as we are able. Rock yards are not pretty. There’s plenty of water on this planet. It’s just not where we need it.We can’t control where it rains and snows or how much. But the same amount of water is still here on this earth as a thousand years ago. This earth was given to us to care for. Lets fix it, even we don’t get rich.
March 18th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
[...] fail to reduce demand. This completely contradicts evidence that Zetland has produced such as case in point Santa Barbara in the 80’s during drought when they implemented very steep block …, which resulted in a steep reduction in demand for [...]