County Recheck Changes Swig of Water to a Sip : Conservation: Agency finds mistakes totaling 50.2 million gallons in its utilities report, and presto! A 27% increase usage becomes a 1% decline.

County officials admitted Wednesday that they erred in preparing a set of monthly utilities statements and said their mistakes dramatically overstated the county’s water use during the past nine months.

The statements, prepared by the General Services Agency and reported in Tuesday’s Times, showed a 27% increase in water use for the first nine months of this fiscal year. But a further review of those statistics, prompted by The Times’ article, found that water use appears actually to be down 1%, officials said.

“We were looking for a big error (in the county report), and we found one,” said Bill Castro, manager of accounting services for the agency. “At this point, there’s no reason to look any further.”

News of the error gratified some officials, who had worried that the county was setting a poor example for residents during a period when state water officials have urged conservation to battle a four-year statewide drought. Just last week, the County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution asking area residents and governments to cut back their water use by 10%.

Some of the relief, however, was offset by annoyance that the county’s own utility figures proved inaccurate.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Supervisor Thomas F. Riley. “I don’t like to get these kinds of surprises, and I keep telling them that, but I keep getting surprised.”

Two errors accounted for a discrepancy of more than 50 million gallons in this year’s water use, officials said. One, involving 23.3 million gallons, was described as an “inputting error,” in which a water-use form was incorrectly tabulated. The other involved a late billing from the Irvine Ranch Water District, one of several agencies that sell the county water.

The county did not pay a fiscal year 1988-89 bill from the water district until the early part of the 1989-90 year, county officials said. As a result, officials said that 26.9 million gallons used last year were credited to this year, overstating the current year’s usage.

R.A. Scott, director of the General Services Agency, acknowledged that the errors in the report had rendered its year-to-date totals inaccurate.

In a memorandum to the county supervisors Wednesday, Scott said county water use is actually down by 1% so far this year, despite the fact that the county has workers occupying 5% more building space. His memo added, however, that there “are some areas in which improvements can be made.”

Automatic shower valves in one facility, for instance, did not work as planned, consuming more water “than acceptable,” according to the memo.

County expenditures for water this year are also higher than last year, Scott said, up about $5,000 to $438,000. He attributed that increase, however, to rising water prices, not increased consumption.

Although the overall numbers changed dramatically as a result of the county’s re-evaluation, statistics for most individual facilities remained unchanged. The county’s Hall of Administration, where the supervisors have their offices, has recorded a 6% increase in water use during the past nine months, and that figure is apparently correct, Castro said.

He added, moreover, that even after review, it is impossible to say with absolute certainly that the new numbers are accurate. The review of the utilities’ report only went so far as to uncover the two errors that seemed to account for the discrepancy between the county’s estimates of usage and the figures in the statement, he said.

“I really can’t give you a 100% guarantee that these numbers are correct,” Castro acknowledged.