Deluged Mayor Questions 50% Water Cut

Unbowed by the public furor over her extensive personal water use, San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor is vowing no retreat from her commitment to oppose mandatory water use restrictions here or her campaign for smaller water cutbacks from the state, her spokesman said Tuesday.

O’Connor on Tuesday asked the state Department of Water Resources to “reassess the necessity for a 50% water cutback” in light of recent heavy rains and snows.

“Please give this matter the priority attention it deserves and reassess the necessity for a 50% water cutback,” O’Connor wrote to David N. Kennedy, director of the state Department of Water Resources. “Every percentage point translates to vital jobs.”

Mayoral spokesman Paul Downey, who has spent much of the past two days fielding telephone calls from the media and public about O’Connor’s personal water consumption, said the mayor “feels as strongly--if not more strongly--about continuing what she’s doing, especially when she sees it continuing to rain.”

The Times reported Sunday that O’Connor’s Point Loma home consumed more than twice as much water as the mayor and the city Water Utilities Department had previously acknowledged--enough, in fact to place O’Connor and her husband, Robert O. Peterson, among the city’s top 100 residential water users.

O’Connor released statistics last week showing her 1990 average daily water use at 3,248 gallons after The Times questioned her about a second water meter at her nearly two-acre home. O’Connor said that she had been unaware of the second meter, which was billed to a separate address.

Those developments, coming amid O’Connor’s campaign for a voluntary water conservation program for San Diego, have made her the target of scathing commentary on local radio talk shows, triggered irate telephone calls to her office, insider jokes, public gossip, and Tuesday, a critical editorial in the San Diego Tribune, the afternoon newspaper ordinarily supportive of her policies.

“The mayor has been seriously disabled as she tries to rally support for voluntary conservation,” said the editorial, lamenting the mayor’s “water-gate.”

Reached at the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa in Kohala, Hawaii, where she was leading San Diego’s bid for the 1993 Super Bowl, O’Connor said Tuesday, “We’ve cut back 60%, and I’m not asking anybody to do something that I’m not personally doing.

“Based on the present rains, and as far as I’m concerned, the drought is over. The 50% cutbacks would mean that major jobs would be lost.”

Downey said that O’Connor’s office has received 50 to 60 telephone calls from citizens outraged about her water use and second meter, but that many callers have been placated when reminded of two points: That the mayor voluntarily released the damaging information, and that she has personally exceeded the conservation goals she set for San Diego.

The mayor’s statistics, confirmed by information released Monday by the Water Utilities Department, show that her home used 12.8% less water in 1990 than the previous year. For the period between Feb. 13 and March 14, 1991, O’Connor saved 51.5% over the previous year and 61.5% over 1989, the mayor’s statistics show.

Times staff writers Ralph Frammolino in Sacramento and Michael Granberry in Kohala, Hawaii, contributed to this story.