Water: How Tough the Drought? : Actually, even a little conservation in Los Angeles will go a long way

The key to water conservation is keeping the rules simple. That’s because people will make or break any water conservation plan that government can devise. If they can’t figure out what’s expected of them, the odds are that they will break the plan.

That’s why it’s unfortunate that the debate over whether the city of Los Angeles should add water rationing to the already complicated lives of its citizens makes the whole exercise sound like assembling Christmas toys or filling out tax returns.

A little arithmetic shows that it will be nothing of the kind. The tightest rules the city is now proposing would amount to nothing more than installing a low-flow shower head. If that is something a family has done since 1986, staying under the limit on water usage is not likely to require anything more--certainly nothing as painful as a tax return.

What the Department of Water and Power calls Phase 2 of water conservation, and what the City Council is poised to approve, would require one cutback in consumption for DWP customers on March 1 and a second cutback May 1.

Starting March 1, customers can use only 90% as much water as they used in the same month of 1986. In May, the ceiling would drop to 85%.

The average city resident uses 180 gallons of water a day. To keep the arithmetic simple, it helps to assume that the average resident used the same amount in May, 1986.

Since the most Mayor Tom Bradley has asked for is a 15% reduction, that means the customer would use 27 gallons less a day. By stunning coincidence, the difference between a 5-minute shower under a conventional shower head and one under a low-flow shower head is 27.5 gallons.

The penalty for going over the limit, which the DWP calls a surcharge, is simply intended to provide a financial incentive to cooperate with the plan. Again, it is far short of a sentence to Devil’s Island. A DWP customer would pay 2.5 cents for every gallon he or she used beyond the limit, plus 25% of the total bill. The penalty gets stiffer with each violation, but customers also can bank water to avoid penalties, using less some months and more in others.

There could be minor complications for apartment dwellers because not one apartment house in Los Angeles has a meter for every tenant. But DWP says that the last time water was rationed, in 1977, that took care of itself. Tenants eventually figured out which neighbors were spending too much time in the shower and helped the building owner or manager keep consumption down.

Two points need to be made: The plan is simple and politicians should resist the temptation to make it sound more complicated and burdensome than it is. In the fifth year of what may be one of the most severe droughts in state history, there is no option.