Council voted unanimously to continue the 20 percent reduction in water use per the 2020 Water Shortage Contingency Plan last week despite an abnormally wet winter that pulled much of the state out of drought.
The decision was part of the Annual Water Shortage Assessment Report that is due each year by July 1 to the California Department of Water Resources and also requires formal adoption by Santa Monica City Council.
The City has remained in a "Stage 2 Water Shortage level" since 2014 and has consistently maintained 20 percent reductions in water demand from the guideline 2013 water usage levels.
Dinaz Kureishy, Civil Engineering Assistant with the City of Santa Monica, provided a short, succinct presentation addressing many of the misconceptions of perceived water shortages, especially given the relatively wet winter that southern California endured earlier in the year.
"There’s been a lot of talk about the drought, given the recent rain that California received. And that rain did partially relieve the drought, together with the water that we received from the State Water Project," Kureishy said.
"However, another really big source of imported water for us is from the Colorado River and those levels are not recovering quite at the same pace. There are some projections that say that it may never recover in our lifetimes. So continuing with conservation really ensures that we are ahead of the curve and we’re prepared for some of our imported water to maybe not recover."
As such, Kureishy recommended the city adopt the 2023 Annual Water Shortage Assessment Report and remain at a "Stage 2 Water Shortage Level" that continues to require a 20 percent reduction in water use per the City’s 2020 Water Shortage Contingency Plan, which was adopted by City Council in June 2021.
"How is this going to affect us going forward?" Councilmember Christine Parra asked, adding, "Within the next eight years, we’re going to have 9,000 new units, so how is that going to affect our supply and will it raise rates?"
Sunny Wang, Water Resources Manager at City of Santa Monica explained that development was factored into the 2020 urban water management plan and it probably increased predicted demand by about 10 percent.
"So, it’s really about how much more we can advance our water conservation programs and that’s what our staff is currently working on, the city’s first water conservation master plan to get us there.
"But we’re actually in pretty good shape, our residents have been great at conserving water and that’s a big part of the picture," Wang said, before explaining in a roundabout manner that the more we conserve, the lower our rates will be. "In terms of our rates and what they might look like, we are improving our control over these, but we’re embarking on a [more comprehensive] rate study later this year."
Santa Monica’s state of the art Sustainable Water Infrastructure Project (SWIP), while promising to significantly increase the City’s capacity to capture and reuse water, is still awaiting official activation with no timeline in place as testing and inspection continues.
"We’re hoping that it’ll be in full production mode by the end of June or early summer," Wang told the Daily Press at the Heal the Bay event last week. "We’re still going into the final testing phase of the regulator, given the first of its kind nature of these projects, there’s just a lot of testing. Even the results from DDW [Division of Drinking Water] require further scrutiny before they’re comfortable enough to give us the okay to send that water in the system."
