20 Gallon Challenge

What is the latest water supply update?

Why couldn't a water supply shortage have been prevented?

How successful have conservation efforts been?

If the drought is over, do we need to continue to conserve water?

How much water does San Diego County receive from the State Water Project?

How much water does the San Diego region use every year? What’s the average per capita water use?

What tips and programs are available to help residents and businesses save water?

Where else can I go to get more information on conservation tips and programs?

If I live in a community with a homeowner’s association, do I have the legal right to replace grass in my front or back yard with a drought-tolerant landscape?

Were farmers being asked to conserve more water?

Were San Diego County’s water supply challenges caused by a drought?

Who decided to implement mandatory conservation?

How do I know if there are still mandatory restrictions where I live?

Do dry conditions always mean supply shortages?

Can the "drought" or dry conditions we experience return?

Does the Water Authority have a strategy or plan to deal with future dry conditions?

Does the Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan cover all of San Diego County?

What is the Water Authority doing to minimize potential impacts from futue droughts and other water supply shortages?

What is the current diversity of the San Diego region’s water supply?

Is the Water Authority adding more water storage capacity?

What is the Water Authority doing to support seawater desalination?

Why do we need to get so much of the region’s water from imported supplies?

Why are water rates continuing to go up?

Does the Water Authority support the use of recycled water? Can we make it mandatory to use recycled water for outdoor irrigation?

Is Indirect Potable Reuse being considered to enhance supplies?

If there is one thing I should do to conserve water, what is it?

Who can I contact if my questions are still not answered?

What is the latest water supply update?

Statewide, supply conditions have improved significantly in 2011. California snowpack conditions were nearly 80 percent above normal at the end of April, and the state Department of Water Resources announced the State Water Project will make 80 percent of its requested deliveries this year – up from 50 percent last year, 40 percent in 2009 and 35 percent in 2008. Many key storage reservoirs around the state are nearing their capacity. Governor Jerry Brown ended California’s drought declaration on March 30.

These significant improvements in this year’s weather and water storage led the San Diego County Water Authority Board of Directors to end mandatory urban and agricultural water supply cutbacks, and to lift the agency’s regionwide call for mandatory water use restrictions. Effective April 29, the Water Authority restored full urban water deliveries to its 24 member retail water agencies, which had been required to comply with a regional 8 percent supply cut since July 2009. It also restored full agricultural water deliveries by the Water Authority, which had been cut 13 percent for some agricultural customers since July 2009.

The Water Authority also deactivated its Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan and ended the drought response levels in its Drought Response Conservation Program Ordinance. It is still important for residents and businesses to continue efficient water use practices in the face ongoing supply challenges in the Bay-Delta and the achievement of a state-mandated 20 percent reduction in water use by 2020.

Why couldn't a water supply shortage have been prevented?

Providing a safe and reliable water supply – one without shortages – is the mission of the San Diego County Water Authority. Since the early 1990s, the Water Authority has spent billions of dollars and made significant progress enhancing water reliability and preparing to cope for dry years by developing new local and imported supplies, building major new regional water infrastructure, and promoting conservation.

California's water supply system is still in a crisis and the San Diego region continues to face significant supply challenges. Regulatory restrictions beyond our control limited pumping in the Bay-Delta and reduced water supply benefits from wet winters. While the effects of the restrictions have been offset this year because of improved river flows and judicial orders temporarily easing some measures, there is still no long-term plan in place to settle the ongoing water reliability and environmental issues in the Bay-Delta , traditionally the source of up to 30 percent of our water supply. These regulatory restrictions will continue to make our state system for managing water more vulnerable to weather changes. This will make it even more difficult to cope with and recover from dry conditions in the years ahead.

How successful have conservation efforts been?

In 2010, water use was down by 22.7 percent compared to the same period in 2007–2008. Daily water use has gone down from 185 gallons per person per day in 2007 to 143 gallons in 2010.

If the drought is over, do we need to continue to conserve water?

Conservation has been a way of life in San Diego County for many years, and its importance continues today. It is essential for residents, businesses, and public agencies to make more water-wise practices part of their permanent daily lifestyle. The good news is, everyone can help the region save water by following the water-wise tips outlined on the 20-Gallon Challenge website.

How much water does San Diego County receive from the State Water Project?

In fiscal year 2010, supplies from the State Water Project accounted for about 18 percent of San Diego County’s water supply. Historically, the region has received as much as 30 percent of its total water supply from the SWP.

How much water does the San Diego region use every year? What’s the average per capita water use?

In 2010, the San Diego region used about 566,400 acre-feet of water. In 2007, the region used 628,053 acre-feet of water, a reduction of 157,831 acre-feet in just three years. (An acre-foot is roughly 326,000 gallons, or enough water to supply two average families for a year.) Per capita use varies widely depending on local climate, rainfall levels, residence characteristics and other factors. Overall, however, the average per capita Municipal and Industrial water in the Water Authority service area for fiscal 2010 is 143 gallons a day. This compares to 185 gallons per day in fiscal 2007.

What tips and programs are available to help residents and businesses save water?

The Water Authority, in conjunction with its member agencies, offers many tips and a number of conservation incentive programs that help cover the cost of water-efficient indoor and outdoor water appliances and devices. Please click here for water conservation incentives and programs or check your local water supplier web page.

Where else can I go to get more information on conservation tips and programs?

Here are several additional sources:

You may also want to check with your local water supplier. Contact information and often conservation tips is usually is included in your billing statements.

If I live in a community with a homeowner’s association, do I have the legal right to replace grass in my front or back yard with a drought-tolerant landscape?

Yes. A state law that went into effect on January 1, 2007 (AB 1881), states that the architectural guidelines of common interest developments such as home owners associations, apartment projects, condominium projects, planned developments and stock cooperatives may not prohibit or include any conditions that have the effect of prohibiting low-water-use plants. The Property owners can replace their landscapes if they want, at their own expense. However, HOAs do have the right to require association members to maintain their yards, whether those yards consist of grass or low-water-use landscapes.

Were farmers being asked to conserve more water?

Yes, compared to many other regions where agriculture is an important part of the economy, water prices in San Diego County are significantly higher and constitute, in many cases, the largest cost in a local farmer’s business. As a result, San Diego County farmers are among the most water-efficient farmers and have made substantial investments in conservation. These customers also committed to be the region’s first line of defense by agreeing to take earlier – and larger – water supply cuts than urban water customers in exchange for paying a reduced rate on agricultural water. Some local farmers received cuts to their water supplies in January 2008, when MWD cut deliveries to customers participating in its agricultural water program. Agricultural water deliveries have decreased more than 50 percent compared to four years ago.

Were San Diego County's water supply challenges caused by a drought?

Droughts are no longer solely determined by weather. We have entered an era where our imported water supplies are also vulnerable to judicial or regulatory restrictions that can have powerful impacts on water availability.

San Diego County’s current water supply challenges stem not just from drought conditions over the last several years, but also from regulatory restrictions in the Bay-Delta that are cutting water deliveries from Northern California. This unprecedented combination of challenges has made managing water supplies very difficult for water agencies across California, and will make future water supply shortages more likely.

Who decided to implement mandatory conservation?

In April 2009, MWD first notified its member agencies - including the Water Authority - that it would “allocate” or reduce water deliveries to each member agency. That action took place because MWD didn’t have enough water supplies available from imported supplies, storage, or transfers to meet its current-year demands. The Water Authority in turn allocated reduced amounts of water to each of its 24 member agencies in accordance with the Water Authority’s Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan . The decision to declare specific mandatory water use restrictions for individual customers is made by local retail water agencies.

To help provide consistency in how local retail water agencies respond to times of limited water supplies, the San Diego County Water Authority Board of Directors released a draft model Drought Response Conservation Program Ordinance . The Water Authority’s member agencies used the model ordinance to update their own ordinances to help create similar drought response levels and water conservation requirements throughout the region. Click here for more information about the model ordinance.

Effective April 29, 2011, the Water Authority restored full urban water deliveries to its 24 member retail water agencies. It also restored full agricultural water deliveries, which had been cut 13 percent for some agricultural customers since July 2009. The Water Authority also deactivated its Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan and ended the drought response levels in its Drought Response Conservation Program Ordinance.

How do I know if there are still mandatory restrictions where I live?

Restrictions on individual customers were set by local retail water agencies in accordance with each agency’s drought response ordinance. You can check your local water supplier web page (http://20gallonchallenge.com/zipcode.php) to determine if your supplier has changed or eliminated water use restrictions.

Do dry conditions always mean supply shortages?

Over the last two decades, Water Authority and MWD have invested billions of dollars in conservation programs, new water supplies and large-scale water infrastructure, to help mitigate the impacts of dry years. During this recent shortage, our independent Colorado River water supplies secured by our conservation and transfer agreement with the Imperial Irrigation District and our two water-saving canal-lining projects, and investments made by our 24 member agencies, allowed us to reduce MWD’s mandatory 13 percent shortage allocation to an 8 percent supply cut. If we didn’t have the vision and community support to secure these new water supplies, MWD’s allocation would have been more difficult to manage. We must continue to address our long-term water supply challenges. That means continuing to diversify San Diego County’s water sources, making sensible investments in our region’s water storage and delivery systems, and embracing efficient water use as a permanent way of life to help mitigate the impacts of dry years.

Can the "drought" or dry conditions we experienced return?

Yes. Dry years are more common than wet years in Southern California. We can be sure we will return to dry periods in the future, and we must be prepared for it. Using water wisely and efficiently is still important, and must become a permanent way of life for San Diego County residents. In addition, we must continue to work toward implementing solutions to the ecological and supply reliability problems in the Bay-Delta, and we must continue to make cost-effective investments in major projects and programs in our region that diversify San Diego County's water sources and increase our overall water supply reliability.

Does the Water Authority have a strategy or plan to deal with future dry conditions?

To help the San Diego region manage water resources during times of limited supply, the Water Authority created a Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan. This plan outlines a series of orderly, progressive actions for the Water Authority to take in response to worsening water supply conditions that minimize impacts to the region’s economy and quality of life.

In addition, the Water Authority created a Model Drought Response Ordinance for its member retail agencies. The Model Drought Response Ordinance identifies four drought response levels that contain water-use restrictions that will help achieve demand reduction during water shortages. Member agencies used the Water Authority's model during the recent shortage to update their own ordinances to help provide consistency throughout the region on response levels and water use restrictions that may need to be taken to reduce water demand.

The Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan outlines the stages of water supply conditions and what steps may be necessary to manage available water supplies during these stages.

The Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan stages are as follows:

Normal: Water supplies match demand, with some water stored in local reservoirs for future use. Water agencies encourage wise water use and operate under standard procedures.

Voluntary Supply Management (Stage 1): Metropolitan Water District of Southern California withdraws water to meet current-year demands. The Water Authority encourages increased voluntary conservation, monitors supply and storage conditions, and adjusts operations to maximize storage.

Supply Enhancement (Stage 2): MWD reduces water deliveries. In addition to previous stage activities, the Water Authority looks to buy temporary water transfers. Increased conservation may be required.

Mandatory Cutbacks (Stage 3): MWD and Water Authority have no more supply options, and cut deliveries to member agencies. The Water Authority allocates deliveries. Extraordinary conservation measures may become mandatory. The region had been in Stage 3, from 2009 until April 2011, when the Water Authority ended its supply allocations and called for the lifting of regionwide mandatory water use restrictions.

Does the Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan cover all of San Diego County?

The Water Shortage and Drought Response Plan covers all communities within the Water Authority’s service area, which includes 920,000 acres (approximately one-third of the county’s area) and 97 percent of the county population. A map of the Water Authority’s member agencies is available here. Each local water supply agency has responsibility for implementing drought management actions within its jurisdiction.

What is the Water Authority doing to minimize potential impacts from future drought and water supply shortages?

Enhancing water reliability has been a primary focus of the Water Authority for the past two decades. At the time of San Diego’s last major drought (1987-1992), the region imported 95 percent of its water from a single supplier, MWD. Over-reliance on one provider made the San Diego region vulnerable to reductions in water deliveries.

Since then, the San Diego County Water Authority and its member agencies have significantly diversified and improved the reliability of the region’s water supply. Aggressive conservation programs, new local and imported supplies, and improved infrastructure provide the region with growing resources and flexibility to cope with future dry conditions and regulatory restrictions on our water supplies from Northern California.

For a summary of these achtivities, please read "Enhancing Water Supply Reliability" at www.sdcwa.org.

What is the current diversity of the San Diego region’s water supply?

In fiscal year 2010, about 50 percent of San Diego County’s water supply was imported from MWD, which gets its water from the Colorado River and Sacramento – San Joaquin River Delta. In addition, the Water Authority imported about 26 percent of its water from Imperial County through a long-term water conservation and transfer agreement and two seperate canal-lining agreements. About 21 percent of the region’s water came from local water supplies, including groundwater, surface water, recycled water and water saved through conservation and an additional 3 percent came from “spot” or short-term transfers of water. For more information on the Water Authority’s diversification strategy, please read our 2010 Annual Report “Water Works – Assuring our Future” at: www.sdcwa.org/2010-water-authority-annual-report.

Is the Water Authority adding more water storage capacity?

Yes. First, the Water Authority is adding more storage as part of its Emergency Storage Project, a system of reservoirs, pipelines, and pumping stations that will provide an additional 90,100 acre-feet of emergency water storage capacity for use during disasters or other supply shortages. Already complete are the Olivenhain Dam and Reservoir. The reservoir stores 24,000 acre-feet of water, 18,000 of which are available for emergencies. In addition, several pipelines are being built to improve the ability to move water from local reservoirs, and to make 21,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Hodges available during emergencies. Also, construction is under way to raise San Vicente Dam 117 feet to store an additional 152,000 acre-feet of water, 52,100 for emergencies and 100,000 for carryover storage – surplus water collected during wet periods to be used during drier years.

What is the Water Authority doing to support seawater desalination?

The Water Authority is working on a water purchase agreement with Poseidon Resources, a private company developing the nation's largest seawater desalination facility in Carlsbad, California. The draft is based on a term sheet approved by the Water Authority Board in July 2010. The term sheet is not a binding contract, but serves as the basis for staff to negotiate elements of an agreement, including water purchase price, allocation of risk, and options to eventually buy the project’s pipeline and the desalination plant itself.

Before any negotiations on a final agreement, Poseidon must secure sufficient financial commitments from private investors to fully fund project construction. Poseidon also must complete all agreements for construction and operation of the project and finalize documents needed to finance the project in the bond market, prior to Water Authority Board approval of a final agreement. For more information, click here .

In addition, the Water Authority is studying other opportunities to develop desalinated seawater as a new water supply for San Diego County. This includes conducting a feasibility study of the potential to build a seawater desalination plant at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. The Water Authority’s goal is to have seawater desalination provide 10 percent of the region’s water supply by 2020.

The Water Authority also is participating in a binational feasibility study of a large-scale seawater desalination plant that would be constructed in Rosarito Beach in Baja California, Mexico. The objective of this study is to evaluate the potential for constructing a seawater desalination plant with a capacity of up to 75 million gallons per day. The water supply from this project could be made available to U.S. and Mexican water users, augmenting Colorado River supplies.

Why do we need to get so much of the region’s water from imported supplies?

Unlike some other parts of Southern California, San Diego County is “hydrologically challenged” in that it has relatively few local water resources (surface and groundwater sources) to draw from. The Water Authority and its member agencies are maximizing the development of new local supply projects. The last time locally generated water supplies (from surface water runoff into local reservoirs) were sufficient to support the county's population and economy was 1946.

Why are water rates continuing to go up?

Water rates are increasing mostly due to significant changes in the cost of purchasing and conveying water to San Diego County. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Water Authority’s largest water supplier, approved rate increases for calendar years 2011 and 2012, including an 18.5 percent increase in its 2011 transportation rate – the rate the Water Authority pays MWD to transport its Colorado River water supplies to San Diego County. These rate increases get passed through to the Water Authority's member agencies, which, in turn, pass them on to individual customers. The Water Authority’s costs for purchasing other water supplies also are going up, and that will affect rates as well.

In June 2010, the San Diego County Water Authority Board of Directors unanimously approved filing suit against the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California over MWD's adopted 2011 and 2012 water rates. The suit claims that MWD charges too much for using its facilities to transport water and spends those revenues to subsidize the water supply costs of other MWD member agencies.

At the center of this dispute is how MWD allocates State Water Project and other water supply costs among its different rate categories. MWD purchases more than half of its water from the State Water Project under a water supply contract with the Department of Water Resources. Instead of treating these purchases as a cost of water, MWD allocates nearly 80 percent of this cost to charges it imposes for the transportation of water through MWD facilities.

The Water Authority believes this discriminates against the Water Authority, which is the single largest user of MWD transportation services. The Water Authority uses MWD facilities to transport Colorado River water it purchases under water conservation agreements with the Imperial Irrigation District and also from lining portions of the All American and Coachella Canals.

Under the recently adopted rates, MWD will overcharge the Water Authority and its ratepayers by approximately $31 million in 2011 and approximately $34 million in 2012 for transporting the Water Authority’s Colorado River supplies from the Imperial Valley. If MWD continues to set annual rates using the same flawed formula, the Water Authority’s ratepayers may be overcharged as much as $230 million annually by 2021.

For more information on the Water Authority’s rate challenge law suit go to: http://www.sdcwa.org/mwd-rate-challenge

Does the Water Authority support the use of recycled water? Can we make it mandatory to use recycled water for outdoor irrigation?

Recycled water is already an important part of the county’s current and future water supply. The Water Authority projects that recycled water will meet 6 percent of the region’s water needs by 2020. Recycled water requires a separate water distribution system, which can be expensive to install. Thus recycled water is not available in all areas.

Is Indirect Potable Reuse being considered to enhance supplies?

Yes. Indirect potable reuse (IPR) is the blending of advanced-treated recycled or reclaimed water into a natural water source, such as a groundwater basin or surface water reservoir. After the water blends for a period of time, the water is then recovered, treated through conventional methods and then sent into the delivery system. Several local agencies in San Diego County are exploring IPR projects to enhance local supplies, and the Water Authority supports supply projects backed by local agencies. In a public opinion survey conducted this spring, 67 percent of respondents supported IPR, up from 63 percent in 2009 and 28 percent in 2005.

If there is one thing I should do to conserve water, what is it?

Limiting your outdoor water use is the best way to save large amounts of water. Outdoor water use can account for 50 percent or more of a household’s total water use, depending on the size of your yard. Fix any leaks, adjust sprinklers that are overspraying onto paved areas and adhere to any landscape watering rules from your local water provider. These steps can save a lot of water and still maintain a healthy landscape. Be sure to check with your local water agency (http://20gallonchallenge.com/zipcode.php) for local water use guidelines and rules.

Who can I contact if my questions are still not answered?

If you have questions regarding the Water Authority’s water supply management, diversity strategy, or how to incorporate water smart practices in your daily life, please call the Water Authority at 858-522-6600 or visit the Water Authority website at www.sdcwa.org. If you have specific questions about your water bill or water conservation in your residential or business area, please contact your local member agency .

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