City Had Its Dry Run at Water Conservation

With the county’s toughest water conservation ordinance forcing them to monitor every drop of water in their expansive oceanfront home, Ralph and Nita Robertson responded with what they considered to be the simplest solution.

They ripped out the grass in their back yard and covered the area with bricks and cactus plants.

“We’re down about 62% of last year’s consumption,” Ralph Robertson said of his water usage.

As much of Southern California prepares for water rationing ordered last week by the Metropolitan Water District to take effect Feb. 1, San Clemente residents speak from experience.

Officials in this coastal city of 40,00 people enacted a water rationing law after a severe water shortage in the summer of 1989, when the Palisades Reservoir dropped from 44 million gallons to half that amount. The drop was caused by higher demand for water and an inability to boost the amount of water received from the MWD, officials said. About 95% of the city’s water supply comes from the MWD, with the remaining 5% supplied by wells.

As part of the water rationing plan, a building moratorium was imposed in January, water wasters became subject to costly fines, and from mid-June to mid-September, lawn watering was allowed only during certain hours and on assigned days.

The City Council also voted this month to contribute $72,000 to help install water-saving plumbing fixtures in homes built before 1982. State law required that homes built after that time have those devices.

At the Robertson household, it will take six or seven years to make up in water bill savings the expense of installing the brick--but gone is the hassle of remembering the odd-numbered days on which they could water their lawn.

“All in all, it turned out to be advantageous,” Nita Robertson said, adding that they also quit letting the water run while they brushed their teeth. They made other minor adjustments in their lifestyle in an effort to cooperate with the city’s water conservation efforts.

Greg Morehead, San Clemente utilities manager, said that because the city has already undertaken a water conservation program, the water saved by the city so far will be credited against the water reduction quota to be imposed by the MWD.

Under the city’s conservation law, if a home exceeds the allotted 52 units of water for every two months--each unit equals 748 gallons--the $1.24-per-unit cost would increase by 62 cents for each unit over the limit.

During the summer months, residents were allowed to water their lawns on certain days and during the late evening and early morning hours, and irrigation water users, including neighborhood associations, faced similar restrictions. Violators could be fined, and on the second offense, faced having their water shut off after an administrative hearing.

Lois Curtis, hired to be the city’s “water cop” to check for violations, said she issued warnings but no tickets during the summer water conservation program.

“They (citizens) realized the position that the city was in and they were cooperative,” Curtis said recently. “I tended to make it more educational. Once you show people they can save money by saving water, they jump on the bandwagon.”

And statistics offered by the city show a decrease in water usage from July 6 to Aug. 24, contrasted with the same period in 1989.

Irrigation water users consumed 22% less water than the year before, even though there was a 14% increase in customers, Curtis said. Residential users decreased their usage by 5%, with a 4% rise in the number of accounts, and commercial customers showed a 3% drop in usage even though the number of customers increased by 12%, the water official added.

But as time goes on, officials will monitor whether citizen interest remained high or tapered off as the summer restrictions ended.

“I think they think we are out of the danger period, and a lot of people give up on it,” Curtis said of the expected drop in conservation after September. Figures on water usage after the summer months are not yet available, Curtis said.

However, Curtis said she still receives calls from people wanting to report water wasters, and as the MWD prepares for mandatory rationing, she said, the citizens will at least continue to be aware of the problem.

San Clemente resident Andrea Moore’s last water bill showed that her family’s water consumption jumped 135% over the same two-month period last year.

“For a while I was doing good,” she said of her efforts to save water. “Then I was thinking ‘winter is coming, we are going to get some rain. That will take care of the problem.’ But we didn’t get rain.”

A flower shop owner who asked not to be identified said she and her husband do not use much water at home because they do not have a lawn, so the law “did not affect us that much.”

Another woman who also asked for anonymity said that she does not pay the water bill for the duplex apartment she is renting but that her landlord sent her a letter urging her to conserve.

“The kids do not run the water when they are brushing their teeth, they do not let the water run,” she said, adding that they are practicing what they are being taught in school. “We don’t have a dishwasher, and we do full loads of laundry.

“As you can see,” she said, pointing to the dead grass and parched earth that make up her front yard, “we don’t water much.”

But among those not so eager to comply with the water rationing laws are some irrigation water users who contract with landscaping firms to keep the grass green.

“The people don’t care what the city says; they don’t care what the state says; they don’t care what the problem is. They want their areas to look green,” said Monty Bell, operations manager for L. Williams Landscape Inc.

The firm’s marketing director, Tom Paulson, said that when they saw the drought worsening a couple of years ago, they persuaded many of their clients to install more efficient sprinkler systems and drought-resistant plants.

Still, he said, his firm was required to add a couple of workers in San Clemente just to monitor the sprinkler systems to ensure that enough water was getting to the plants without exceeding the city limits.

“It was a tough summer, but it was a livable summer. The plants made it through,” Paulson said. “And we are not looking forward to next summer.”