Bradley to Unveil Plan for Rationing of Water : Drought: The mayor is likely to call for a mandatory 10% cut from 1986 consumption levels, aides say.

Faced with what aides describe as a now-or-never decision, Mayor Tom Bradley will call today for mandatory water rationing to begin as soon as possible in Los Angeles, according to his senior advisers.

Bradley will announce details of the plan at a press conference scheduled for this morning, according to aides, who scrambled late into the day to pull the program together.

The exact provisions of the rationing plan--which must be approved by the City Council--were not available late Tuesday. But based on proposals made earlier by the Department of Water and Power, it is likely that the mayor will call for a mandatory 10% cut from consumption levels in 1986, the aides said.

Aides said it is necessary to call for rationing now because waiting any longer may mean that the plan could not be implemented before the critical hot summer months. “It’s either do it now, or wait until next year,” said one of the mayor’s top aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

City water officials earlier had said that it would take at least a month and possibly several months to put a rationing program in place.

Bradley, who a month ago had called for a voluntary 10% cutback, told reporters Monday that “the public has not gotten the message” about the critical water shortage and that he was determined to “go forward with a water-rationing program.”

Under the revised emergency conservation law that Bradley is expected to propose, violators would suffer stiff financial penalties, but would not face having their water service disconnected unless they were chronic wasters of water.

The mayor’s call for rationing would be one of the most drastic steps yet taken in Southern California in response to a projected 10% shortage in water supplies from the Metropolitan Water District.

“This may well set the tone” for Southern California, said Carl Boronkay, general manager of the MWD. “I think the mayor is taking a leadership position.

“Ultimately, we want to leave it up to the individual member agencies how they reach the end we all seek,” Boronkay added.

The MWD supplies 60% of all the water to Los Angeles and the six-county region running from Mexico to Ventura County, but its supplies have dwindled this year, the fourth consecutive year of drought conditions in the West.

The MWD has called on the 300 communities it serves to have rationing laws on the books in case they need to be implemented, but so far the giant water agency has stopped short of asking any city to actually ration water.

Just what kind of reception the mayor’s plan will receive in the City Council is unclear.

Councilman Marvin Braude enthusiastically endorsed Bradley’s proposal.

“I’m happy the mayor has taken this initiative,” Braude said. “I think it’s apparent we take a mandatory position . . . and it’s important for Los Angeles to be a leader.”

Councilwoman Ruth Galanter said, “If we wait too long,” to implement rationing, “we will have to take even more drastic action” than a 10% cutback.

But council member Joan Milke Flores, who chairs the key Commerce, Energy and Natural Resources Committee that oversees water matters, said she believes that the mayor is reacting to media pressure in calling for rationing at this point.

“I’m not sure if that is good or bad, but I believe he is reacting to the media” and not necessarily to the facts now before him, Flores said.

“I don’t know where this (Bradley’s rationing proposal) is coming from,” she said.

Flores noted that she got no indication from DWP staff that rationing was deemed necessary at this point.

Some city water officials were also surprised to hear of the mayor’s decision. Engineers at the DWP have yet to make any recommendation on whether rationing is necessary.

Rick Caruso, president of the DWP’s board of commissioners, said: “We’ll wait and see what the mayor calls for and we’ll respond to it. . . . If the mayor calls up, we’ll review (the facts) and give our opinion. “I think the mayor’s concern is that the city take a leadership role,” Caruso said. “I think he wants us to be out front on this issue.”

The DWP’s opinion on the adequacy of Los Angeles’ water supply could be important to council passage of any rationing law.

Under the existing law, the DWP would have to make a finding that rationing is necessary before the measure could be implemented.

But Bradley will be calling on the council to pass a new law--with updated features and stiffer financial penalties--that will probably do away with the provision that bases rationing on a finding of the DWP, aides to the mayor said.

It was unclear what prompted Bradley to act at this time.

Bradley’s own chief deputy said only last Friday that a decision on rationing would take several weeks while the mayor reviewed data on water supplies, consumption rates and effects of conservation.

In response to a request from Bradley, the DWP commissioners last week prepared a list of suggested modifications to the city’s existing water rationing law, but they stopped short of recommending that the program actually be implemented at this time.

Earlier, Bradley said that his rationing decision would hinge on how well residents responded in April to his call to voluntarily cut water use by 10%.

The DWP reported this week that total water consumption dropped by 14% in April, compared to usage in the same month last year. Jim Wickser, DWP assistant general manager, said it is unclear just how much of that cut was the result of conservation and how much was the result of cooler, wetter weather in the Los Angeles Basin this year, compared to April last year.

But yesterday one senior aide to Bradley said, “The DWP has presented the mayor with plenty of information that would justify” rationing.

Under the DWP’s recommendations, Phase 1 of the water conservation law would be amended to include an immediate ban on landscape watering between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and on excessive watering that leads to runoff onto the streets.

The DWP recommended that it be given the power to shut off the flow of water to repeat offenders. Now, only the City Council can order a violator’s service shut off.

Under the rationing proposal that Bradley will probably propose, residents would be limited to using 90% of the water they used in comparable months of 1986.

That year is being selected in an effort to be fair to those customers who have already responded to the the mayor’s repeated calls for conservation during the last several years.

On the first violation, DWP customers would face a surcharge of $3 per billing unit of excess use, plus 15% of the water bill. A billing unit is 748 gallons of water.

A second violation would cost $3 per excess billing unit, plus 25% of the bill. And a third violation would boost the surcharge to $4 per excess billing unit and 75% of the bill.

“A 10% cut is doable without any significant lifestyle changes or economic dislocations,” one aide to the mayor said. In fact, the DWP already has estimated that consumers have cut water use by 8% in the last several years.

Under rationing guidelines recently drawn up by DWP, exemptions to water allotments could be granted if:

Conservation would result in unemployment.

Additional members have been added to a household.

Additional landscaped property has been added since 1986.

Employment has increased at a commercial, industrial or government facility.

Production has increased at a commercial facility.

A swimming pool is being filled for the first time.