Supervisors Back Crisis Task Force on Drought : Emergency: The board hears gloomy assessments. Fines, limits on new building and water reclamation will be studied.

Declaring a water crisis in Ventura County, supervisors on Tuesday endorsed an emergency task force and a plan to ensure that the county has enough water to survive a prolonged drought.

The task force, formed Monday by Supervisor John Flynn, will include representatives of cities and water agencies. The group, which will have about 45 members, will report back to the board with proposals on cutting use and finding new water sources.

Among measures on the task force’s agenda are audits for agricultural users, fines for waste, limits on new building and reclamation of water from sewage treatment plants.

Representatives of the county’s 10 cities are scheduled to meet Thursday to consider enacting residential water limits that close the gap between the 294 gallons a day now allowed for each household in Ventura and the lack of any mandatory limits in Thousand Oaks.

However, the Thousand Oaks City Council Tuesday unanimously approved fines for wasteful practices, such as hosing down sidewalks or watering between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Penalties range from a warning for the first offense to $100 for the fourth.

“We must plan now for the worst-case scenario,” Flynn told fellow board members. Flynn, who had formed the task force himself, said he wanted to update the board on the county’s water supplies and to win backing for the group’s agenda.

The board’s declaration of a crisis followed a series of gloomy assessments by water managers assembled by Flynn to report on the condition of the county’s supplies.

Dale Kile, spokesman for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told supervisors that the MWD board was further cutting back water to its 15 million customers in Southern California, including 450,000 people and 500 farms in Ventura County.

Later Tuesday, MWD announced that it was deepening cuts from 10% to 20% for cities and from 30% to 50% for growers effective March 1. But penalties for use above the new allotments will not take effect until April 1 to allow member agencies time to adjust their billing systems.

Jim Hubert, general manager of the Calleguas Municipal Water District, which distributed 110,000 acre-feet of MWD water in Ventura County last year, said the county should begin to look at water sources that were previously undesirable. An acre-foot supplies two families for one year.

“We have got to develop the brackish ground water in Simi Valley and the Conejo Valley,” he said. Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, whose ground-water supplies are still plentiful, now depend exclusively on Calleguas for their water. Moorpark, Oxnard and Camarillo have supplemental supplies, but depend mainly on imported water.

Hubert said Calleguas will continue to pass along to county customers both penalties and incentives from MWD. The Metropolitan Water District now fines its customers $394 per acre-foot used above their allotment. It refunds a $99 premium to the districts for each acre-foot a month that they save beyond the required cutbacks.

Frederick J. Gientke, general manager of United Water Conservation District, warned against using ground water from the Santa Clara River Valley and the Oxnard Plain to make up for decreased state supplies.

“Every day, every gallon of water pumped out of the basins is a new record low level,” Gientke said of the county’s already overdrafted ground-water basins. Water pumped from United’s district provides all or part of the water supply for about 300,000 people in the county.

Rainfall totals that are at 19% of normal for this time of year have allowed United to divert almost no water from the Santa Clara River, which it uses to refill the underground basins. About 15,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Piru, which is also low because of the drought, will be released in April to help recharge the basins, he said.

Robert E. Quinn, county engineer and coordinator for the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency, said the agency is considering for the first time an ordinance that would penalize farmers who waste water.

“The problem now is that we have to define waste,” he said. The county also has no means at present to enforce a no-waste ordinance.

“No one has the money to hire cops to enforce it,” he said.

He expects to bring a draft of the ordinance to the next agency meeting Feb. 22. The agency was formed to regulate pumping of the Fox Canyon Aquifer, the large freshwater basin that lies beneath the Oxnard Plain.

John Johnson, general manager of Casitas Municipal Water District that serves 50,000 people in the county’s west end, told the board that water flowing into Lake Casitas has decreased by 86% over the last three years.

Johnson has recommended that his board of directors vote at their meeting today to step up the district’s drought plan with mandatory allocations and a moratorium on new hookups.

Flynn said the board’s endorsement of his task force and proposals to attack the drought on a countywide basis lend weight to the need for the public to begin conserving as much as possible.

“It gives legitimacy to this whole emergency drought plan,” he said. “When the public reads (that) an elected body asks for an emergency plan, it shocks the people out of their blase attitudes. It’s a shocker.”

Times staff writer Psyche Pascual contributed to this report.