After billing confusion, L.A. County says its water use decreased 7.4%

Bureaucrats scrambled earlier this month when a report appeared to show that the Los Angeles County government had increased its water use at a time when residents and businesses across California were cutting back amid the ongoing drought.

A report by the county’s Internal Services and Public Works departments showed that the overall billed water usage by the nation’s largest local government had increased 4% from the 2014 fiscal year to the 2015 fiscal year.

County officials quickly contested the data’s accuracy and launched a second round of number-crunching.

An updated report released Friday showed that water use by county departments had, to the contrary, decreased by 7.4% from 2014 to 2015.

The new report blamed much of the confusion on issues with the billing system of the city-owned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Officials said a “delayed submission” of bills by the DWP had resulted in water use from 2014 getting counted in addition to the 2015 total. They also pointed to a three-month span in which bills for the county headquarters in downtown Los Angeles stated “bad estimated meter read.” The report also said county officials had estimated water usage for some months, but the actual numbers turned out to be lower than expected.

A spokeswoman for the DWP said workers there are looking into the issue but “will likely need some time to verify definitively if our billing system impacted L.A. County’s accounts.”

Among the departments that showed an increase in the original report were the Board of Supervisors and the county Chief Executive’s Office. The downtown Hall of Administration showed an increase of more than 50%, although its total water use was a small portion of the county’s total.

The new analysis released Friday showed a 10% decrease in water usage at county headquarters.

The county’s heaviest water user, and the apparent driver of the increase in the earlier report, was the Department of Parks and Recreation, which uses about 2 billion gallons of water a year and accounts for about half of of total county water use.

The parks department showed a 10% increase in use in the initial analysis, but the updated figured showed a 9% decrease.

Even with the updated numbers, the county fell short of the 25% cut in urban water use that Gov. Jerry Brown called for in April.

County staff recommended a series of water-saving measures, including no longer using potable water to irrigate grass at county facilities, swapping out turf for drought-tolerant landscaping, replacing toilets with lower water-use models, and upgrading cooling tower water treatment systems.

County supervisors are slated to discuss the report’s findings Tuesday. They will also consider a proposal by Supervisor Don Knabe to limit the washing of county cars to once a month and look into using recycled water.

Knabe’s proposal came after the Los Angeles Daily News reported that most of the supervisors had been getting their county-issued cars washed by staff two or three times a week, and that the frequency of washes increased after the governor called for conservation.

“This runs totally counter to the County’s stated efforts to conserve water, and it sets a very poor example to those looking for County leadership in water conservation during this historic drought,” Knabe wrote.

Follow Abby Sewell on Twitter at @sewella for more county news.