Are San Diegans Getting Mixed Messages About Water Conservation?

This is KPBS Midday Edition. I Maureen Cavanaugh. The state water resources Board decided yesterday to extend the governors emergency water conservation regulations with some notable exceptions. Water suppliers like the can San Diego County water pretty may have a conservation resources reduced for providing sustainable water sources like a desalination plant. That's a very good thing considering the information in a new report Voice of San Diego. Because of an arc -- number of different factors, San Diego is apparently facing the mind-boggling situation of having an oversupply of treated water. Voice of San Diego reporter Ry Rivard has been following the story. I spoke with him earlier today. Ry, how much of a surplus of water is San Diego dealing with? We are talking about treated water right now. The city and the county to take all of the untreated water that we could use and we could put it in some of our major reservoirs. This is about water that has already been treated. Since mid-November, we put about a half billion gallons of this water into a lake where needs to be treated again if we ever want to drink it. How much will it cost to retreat the water to make it drinkable again? Water officials use these things called acre-feet. At about 1700 acre-feet that's about 30,000 pounds or so. It cost about 150 bucks for a foot for the water in the lake to be treated. That would be a quarter of $1 million. How much did you say the County water Authority had dumped in that league -- late? Is about half billion gallons which is 1700 acre-feet. How did we go from conserving water -- you know not getting water unless we ask for it in restaurants to dumping drinking water into a lake? So the county and water officials will say you still need to save some water. But what is happened is, we planned getting back decades really to build up our water supply and we've invested as a region fairly heavily in things like desalination plants and rather expensive rights to River water from the Colorado River. We been accumulating a lot of different water and new water over the years. Here we enter this drought and what's happened is, the governor came along and said I want everyone to use far less water than you been using. So were getting more water and were supposed to be using a lot less. That's created the situation where we have a large surplus of water. Why can't San Diego water authority turn off the tap when we don't need to supply. Why can't we stop getting so much of this treated linkable water from the desalination plant when we actually don't need it? So you'd like your pointing out that there are three different sources of water going into the lake were talking about -- the surplus water. One of the desalinated water. We can't stop receiving that. We signed a counteract -- we signed a contract with Poseidon resources the owner of the plant, that says we are going to buy water from you for the next couple of decades whether we needed or not. We signed a contract thinking we would always need their water. The second source of water is water that we ourselves treat in the county at a treatment plant in San Marcos. The third source is from the Metropolitan water District of Southern California. The County water Authority here has been fighting for years with Metropolitan over numerous issues and this is sort of the latest. The water authority said too much of Colleton stop sending us water. We don't need it. And Metropolitan says while the pipes were designed to not send water. They were designed to send water so we will keep sending it to you until we can figure out how to get these pipes to be able to send less water. It interesting that the Metropolitan water and the water we treat ourselves in San Marcos are some of the cheapest sources of water. Yet because we signed this contract with Poseidon, we have to buy the most expensive. What kind of an impact -- did you calculate this or think about it at all, has the cutbacks that residents have made in using water, in the surplus we have now? The drought restrictions have actually contributed to this oversupply. So I don't have really good recent numbers. Last year the County water Authority estimated that it would have 99% of the water that everyone would need if we didn't comply with the governors mandate. Of course, for the most part, we have complied with the governors mandate. You can think of it that we are using 75% of the water we would use if we had just kept going. If the governor had asked us to stop using so much water. Which is why some of it is getting used -- dumped in the lake. Yes. There's also an ancillary argument that the County water Authority and the Metropolitan water District are having over this water that the Metropolitan cannot stop pumping to San Diego even though San Diego doesn't need it. Is how much the county will pay for that water right? Right. The County water Authority -- at one point it look like we might end up back in court the Metropolitan and the water authority wind up in court. Are fighting in court over some of the things right now. But there seems to be a compromise in the works where the County water Authority is saying we dumped this treated water into the lake and that was an ideal. Will pay for the value of the water as water as if it were not treated. And Metropolitan you eat the cost of the treatment of the water which is significant expense turning natural water into something humans can drink. The compromise would be about $400,000 that Metropolitan would just not asked the county for. In total, this report is sort of disturbing to people who have been trying very hard to cut back on their water use. The County water Authority -- you mention in your article, is actually asking the state now to exempt it from mandatory water restrictions. They sent an 11 page letter asking for some sort of special circumstance for San Diego. Ever since the governor announced his cutbacks, the County water Authority has said this isn't really the way we would prefer that you governor do policy. We would prefer a more regional approach. It seems like the state and the governor and the state water board heavily said California is in this together is water isn't being used in one place, it can be used in another. The County water Authority has been pushing back and saying, we have this desalination plant and that water is our water. They can't use that in Porterville where there is no water for some of their citizens right now. The water authority is really arguing that if you have water where you are, it doesn't -- the state shouldn't be able to take it from you, is kind of the view the water authority has adopted. Obviously, the state is different. The state and water authority but have different political cinchona trees. -- Constituent chief -- supporters. Finally Ry, what has the County water Authority's response been to your reporting on this? I haven't talked to them since the story came out. So I'm not totally sure. Okay. Will find out as we go along. I've been speaking with Ry Rivard and you can read his reporting on San Diego's oversupply of treated water. Joining me is chair of the San Diego water authority board Mark think you for joining us. Nice being here. What is your reaction to the story? I think we left out details. I had about an hour conversation with Ry last week. We really need to look back in the early 1990s when San Diego is based with up to a 50% reduction in the result of that was San Diego our economy and residents expect to have a firm water supply. We began 20 years of planning and building projects to make sure that San Diego economy and residents have the water they needed. We've done an incredible job. We've invested about $3 billion to make sure we have enough water. Even in the face of a drought that was a for a five-year drought, we were going to make sure we had available water. So when the governor in Northern California's wake-up call to the severity of the drought was in 2014, what the received was a statewide mandate. And there was no consideration for the investments made by all of our ratepayers. Is that why the authority dragged its feet on jumping on board the state water conservation effort? I know the County water Authority was saying, we've already cut back our water use by so much. Was also you saw perhaps you're going to have to deal with these unintended consequences of becoming water independent and having to go along with what the state wanted while we have a sufficient supply here? I think we were on board ahead of everyone else. We now use 40% less water for capita today than we did in 1990. We've instilled an incredible amount of conservation and efficiency in San Diego County. We also have developed a new water supplies. So our comments to the state water board on these emergency regulations last May was, it's not only demand reduction, it's also we should get credit for the supplies we built and we met everything that the governor has asked in the California water action plan. Create local water supply, conservation and get off the Delta. Did you see this potential problem with having too much treated water if indeed San Diego County water Authority was compelled to comply to this 25% or so mandate from the state? Did you see this coming? We had estimated when the desalination plant came online Vnet and all of the other water supplies that we would have sufficient supplies. We would not have surplus. When the governor implemented 25% reduction statewide, we came to a point where it became close. So we asked Metropolitan to reduce flows on one year 20. Last November. They said we would like to do that, but we physically can't do it due to our protocols on how we monitor -- flow that meter we will have to make changes. We been working very hard with Metropolitan to come up with a technical solution and we don't want to see any treated water go into a reservoir and with -- they don't either. Working closely at solving this problem. Can you explain to and -- why we are committed to buying desalinated water from Poseidon whether we needed or not? There are many ways to build around water agreements from Poseidon. The could have paid for it on a per gallon basis or we could do a long-term contract with a guaranteed amount. For the long-term, water reliability of San Diego we made the decision to have a long-term take or pay contract and we built that all around what we thought was going to be our absolute minimum. We are right at that boundary right now, but we can solve it would just -- with to some minor modifications. So you have already tried to take your case about what's happening in San Diego to the state water board. They've just released their new mandates. I'm wondering do these new mandates provide in your opinion San Diego with enough flex ability? They were very important. We have articulated our position for months. We've been supported by districts, cities and the business community. We sent in most of the comments -- most of them came from San Diego and we need to get new -- credit for building new water supplies. They are going to give us a credit up to 8%. The desalination plant is a little more than 8%. That brings down the conservation goal by 8%. Yes. Suffer community that district or city had 36% mandated reduction, it would be reduced to 28%. But you could never go below 8%. So we found this balance and we really worked hard for the state to find a balance of still improving water conservation, but at the same time, giving credit for new water supplies. What does that mean to the person conserving water in San Diego? Should they use more water? We've seen an incredible response in our customers using less water. But there has been a lot of impact to local landscaping, particularly the trees. I think we need to back off a little bit and will be able to do that with a little bit of a softening of regulations. We still advocate long-term change out of our landscaping to a more water efficient landscaping. We've been working on this for 25 years and that will continue. I don't think a lot of folks will put back in lawns, but what they will be able to do is read landscape, use a little extra water to get the plant started or protect their trees and do a little more deep soaking of their trees. I think that's what's really important about having credit for the investments. The last thing is, our business economy -- whether it's active businesses or the military or hospitals or schools, it provides that flexibility that we will protect the economy as well. So we are still in are raising -- rainy season. You won't water are trees just yet. We are still getting water from the desalination plant and the pipeline can't figure out how to turn the pipeline off. How much more water will we have to dump in treated water into that Lake into Lavista? I think we are very close to a quick solution to turn that meter down to zero. Been a longer-term solution is to work with Metropolitan to install a smaller meter up at their skinner water treatment plant. I think those are all doable. The have incredible operators in both agencies. Do expect more water will be dumped into the lake? Were trying to minimize that as many deaths as much as possible. We do have some scheduled shutdowns over the next several months for maintenance activities. So that will reduce the flow anyway. Okay. I have been speaking with Mark Weston chair of the water board of directors. Thank you so much. Thank you Maureen.