The Water Solution

Editorial: Long Beach Press Telegram
The water solution
Posted: 01/29/2009 10:37:57 PM PST

Shortages have become permanent, so pols must adopt Long Beach's plan.
Southern Californians won't have much melted snow in their drinking water this season, which will worsen an alarming shortage. Fortunately, the solution is easy.
At least the Water Department in Long Beach makes it look easy. It seems to be the only big-city agency that is well-prepared for the worst water shortages the region ever has experienced.
Droughts have come and gone, some of them even more severe, but they went away when the rains returned. The present shortages appear to have become permanent.
You're not hearing much about it yet because politicians, who control the big water agencies, haven't been willing to deal with it. While they dawdled, the region's vast storage capacity has been drying up.
Long Beach was the exception. While politicians in L.A. talked a lot about cutting back on water usage, all they managed to accomplish was a saving of 1 percent, and we're exaggerating to be charitable. Long Beach has cut water usage 11 times that much.
Here's what's coming next. The news this week that the Sierra snow pack continues to be below historical averages, together with earlier court-ordered reductions to save the endangered Delta smelt, means that Southern California's giant Metropolitan Water District, among others, will get only a fraction of what it needs from the State Water Project. Consequently in April, when MWD sets its rates and allocation levels, you can expect that consumers will start paying more and getting less.
Many water agencies on the receiving end are looking at rationing and punitive measures, which is a mistake because rationing penalizes those who already have been conserving water. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa even talks about water police to enforce cutbacks that now are inevitable.
They should take a lesson from Long Beach, whose Water Commission implemented a conservation program months ago. But instead of a punitive approach, it enlisted consumers in the effort. The program, among other restrictions, made watering legal only on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays before 9 a.m. or after 4 p.m. Offenders got a polite letter as a reminder, and consumers began using a phone line to identify offenders.
Wasting water has become socially unacceptable in Long Beach, and residents seem committed to the plan. There have been only four or five repeated offenders, all of them businesses, and all of which surely will quit wasting water in the face of increasingly stiff fines.
When the smaller water allocations do come down from the MWD, Long Beach won't have to do a thing to comply. Its residents, now aware how easy it is to reduce water wastage where most of it occurs, on lawns and gardens, already have begun to use this scarce commodity responsibly.
If the MWD and politicians in places like L.A. and San Diego also had acted prudently months ago, Southern California's reservoirs still would be full, but they didn't, and the reservoirs are emptying rapidly.
Now there is no other choice.