Water Rationing Gets Lukewarm Support : City Council: Panel says if voluntary conservation is saving enough, mayor’s mandatory plan may not be needed.

A skeptical Los Angeles City Council committee Tuesday gave conditional approval to Mayor Tom Bradley’s plan to impose mandatory 10% water rationing this summer, while calling for a report on the effectiveness of ongoing voluntary conservation.

The Commerce, Energy and Natural Resources Committee agreed that if a study finds Los Angeles residents are collectively cutting water use voluntarily by 7% or more, the rationing plan would not be implemented.

“If Los Angeles is only 2% or 3% away from its goal, it doesn’t make sense to go to mandatory rationing at this time,” said committee chairwoman Joan Milke Flores.

Flores asked officials with the Department of Water and Power to prepare statistics that would show how effective voluntary conservation efforts have been in curbing water use. She asked that the DWP measure use in the past 12 months against usage in the comparable 12 months of 1986--before the current four-year drought began.

DWP officials had earlier reported that overall water use was down 14% in April, compared to the same month last year, and that 8% of that was because of water conservation efforts. So far this month, preliminary figures show water usage down about 9%, though officials are unsure how much of that is the result of conservation and how much is because of changes in weather conditions.

The mayor has called for a mandatory 10% cut in every resident’s water use from their pre-drought consumption level in 1986. Bradley proposed the rationing plan on May 2 in a move to deal with the four-year statewide drought and the apparent failure of the city’s water users to voluntarily curb their use by 10%.

The Water and Power Commission last week recommended adopting Bradley’s plan, under which residents and businesses would face stiff financial penalties for failing to cut back water use by 10% from 1986 levels.

The committee voted to send the measure to a hearing of the full City Council on June 15.