sustain

In the July/August 2009 issue of Mother Jones magazine there is an article entitled Why Wasting Water Is So Damn Cheap. It walks through the East Bay’s struggle with drought and its attempts to reduce consumption by ordering most of its residential customers to slash their water use by nearly one-fifth—regardless of how much they were previously using. One problem with this, as the article points out, is it unfairly targets users who were already conservative. Some highlights from the article (my headings):

Tiered Pricing

Composed of dense coastal cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland, as well as sprawling inland suburbs, San Francisco’s East Bay is one of the state’s most balkanized water districts. Typically, 25 percent of the East Bay’s inhabitants suck down 60 percent of its residential water. For this, they are charged as much as 50 percent more per gallon than the most efficient users. During the recent drought they were asked to use 20 percent less and got a rate increase along with everyone else.

Breaking the addiction to cheap water can be tough. Less than half of California’s water districts use tiered pricing. During the last big drought, in 1991, when EBMUD hiked its rates for customers who used more than 250 gallons per day, irate homeowners refused to pay their bills and four inland suburbs sued. The utility relented. “One part of the district was subsidizing another, and fundamentally that’s not fair,” says John Coleman, vice president of the EBMUD board, sounding like a ticked-off conservationist—except that he’s defending the users who couldn’t bear to see their lawns die.

There is No Water Shortage

“There is no water shortage,” says David Zetland, a water policy researcher at the University of California-Berkeley. “We’re just doing the worst job in the world trying to allocate it. If you go down to a bar and Corona costs 12 cents a bottle, you’re gonna run out of Corona. And that’s the problem with water: It’s just too damn cheap to care about.” Even in Southern California’s Irvine Ranch Water District, which sells water to its most frugal customers at below cost but slaps an additional 840 percent charge on the biggest users, 200 gallons at the top rate still cost less than a Frappuccino.