Excessive Water Users Cite Reasons : Ventura: Some customers on the penalty list consumed nearly their year’s allotment in just six months, officials said.

The city of Ventura on Tuesday released a list of 366 water customers who have consistently used more water than the city has allowed since imposing conservation measures last April.

The customers exceeded their water allowances three times, exposing themselves to tenfold penalties for the excess water used in the latest two-month billing period, officials said.

About 45% of them are businesses, and the rest are landlords or homeowners, the list shows.

All of those interviewed Tuesday said they had legitimate reasons for using more water than Ventura allowed.

A citrus grower on Olivas Park Drive said he just wanted to keep his lemon trees alive. A radiator shop owner on Thompson Boulevard said his plumbing leaked. And a Ventura Avenue landlord said she used all the gimmicks she could to conserve water, but she could not prevent her 19 tenants from incurring $7,955 in penalties.

The 40 acres of lemon groves owned by Kenichi Ito’s family have exceeded their allotment of 3.4 million gallons per year in just six months, by using 4.79 million gallons, city water records show.

Ito Farms Inc. incurred $15,309.42 in fines over the past six months, the highest amount levied against any customer since rationing began, records show.

Ito said his family may have to consider closing the orchard on Olivas Park Drive if water becomes scarcer, the city allotment smaller and the resulting fines larger. He said they waited for rainstorms to break the drought and the orchard’s reliance on city water, but the rains never came.

“Just to have a couple of days of rain is not going to do it,” he said. “We need it throughout the whole season. We haven’t seen that yet.”

San Diego Avenue homeowner Cindy Jones said her family of three has installed low-flow shower heads, put plastic dividers into the toilet tanks, switched off their water softener and begun dry-cleaning their jeans and sheets. But the family incurred $863.19 in penalties over the past six months, records show.

City billing records show that Jones, her husband and their 8-year-old son used 153,340 gallons in a six-month period--exceeding their total annual allotment of 130,152 gallons by 23,188 gallons.

The family cut their use by 50% during the last of the three two-month billing periods, but they still are using 40% more water than they were allotted for that period, records show.

“It’s terrible, terrible,” Cindy Jones said. “We’ve come down drastically, and they’re still charging us heavily.”

Landlord Mary Evans said she and her husband installed water-saving plumbing and asked the occupants of the 14 apartments and five storefronts in their building on Ventura Avenue to conserve water.

But in only six months, the building still used 1,091,332 gallons of water, nearly the entire annual allotment of 1,155,660 gallons, records show.

The Evanses paid their regular water bill but have not paid the $7,955.31 in fines, Mary Evans said. “If we’d paid the fines, it almost wipes you out,” she said.

City officials have suggested passing the fines on to the tenants, but Evans said she and her husband, Mark, can’t do that because some rents are federally subsidized and the others would become overpriced for the market.

“If the city will work with us, why, perhaps we won’t have to go bankrupt or something,” Evans said. “There’s nothing else we can do. It isn’t like we can go over and shut the water off on the tenants.”

Hudson’s Bar and Grill incurred $1,251.39 in fines for using 200,464 gallons of water in six months when it was supposed to use only 115,192 gallons, records show.

Restaurant Manager Brady Theodore said the city allots too much water for January through March, when business is relatively slow, and not enough for the rest of the year.

“I can understand they have to do something to keep people from using excess water, and it does make us aware enough to make our employees aware they have to use less,” he said.

Penalties are stiff for Ventura water customers who exceed their allotments.

Customers must pay four times the usual fee for each gallon they use over their allotment during the first two billing periods. If they exceed the allotment for a third consecutive two-month billing period, the fee rises to 10 times for the excess use, said Water Supt. John Mundy.

But city officials have been negotiating with customers to credit their accounts for fines incurred in extraordinary circumstances and complying with most of the 5,000 requests from customers who want their allotments increased, said city spokeswoman Carol Green.

The city will increase allotments depending on the number of occupants, or for customers with medical problems: “If someone has a back injury and needs to use their hot tub, or a person is incontinent and they will need to do more laundry, they go up automatically,” Green said. And fruit trees on private property are allowed an additional eight gallons a day per tree, she said.

Mundy said water officials are just beginning to see patterns of overuse emerge as customers exceed their water allowances for three billing periods in a row.

“The ultimate goal is, we don’t want to surcharge people, we don’t want to cut their flow, we just want them to curtail their usage,” he said, saying the city will reverse the fines for customers who cut back and meet their annual allotment.

“We’re not interested in collecting fines, that’s not the point of the program. We’re hoping we can credit all our surcharges back to the customers.”