Rate Changes Favor Water Conservers : Water: San Diego Council orders five-tiered formula that will penalize households that use more than 250 gallons a day.

The San Diego City Council approved a multi-tiered water rate structure Tuesday that provides incentives to conserve and rewards households that consume 250 gallons per day or less.

By a 7-1 vote, the council directed city water officials to begin reprogramming the city’s computers, now set on a two-tier system, to the five-tiered formula. The actual rates, however, will not be plugged into those formulas until next month, when the council will consider raising water rates as much as 28%.

At the request of several council members, City Manager Jack McGrory summarized the effect of the new rate structure, saying that, even if the city Water Utilities Department wins the rate increase it seeks, most people who conserve will save money.

“If you stay under that goal, your bill will be less, even folding in the rate increase,” he said. “If you exceed 250 gallons a day, you will notice a substantial incremental increase in your monthly billing. And, the more you use over that, the higher your bills are going to get.”

The council vote came after five hours of wrangling over city water policy, a spirited and sometimes cantankerous discussion that nonetheless included frequent references to the “success” of Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s voluntary water conservation program.

O’Connor announced early in the meeting that, as of Tuesday, the city has averaged 36% conservation this month. No matter how much rain falls or how much San Diegans conserve during the five remaining days in March, she said, the city will meet the 30% cutback goal O’Connor set last month.

“Statistically, we’ve made it,” she said, using the achievement of the 30% goal during this, the fifth rainiest March on record, as evidence that voluntary cutbacks are better than mandatory. “The people do want to stand up and be counted. I don’t care what they’re saying about San Diego up and down the state. I’m proud to be your mayor.”

The mayor requested that the city staff augment the new rate structure to reward specifically those people who have conserved during March and April.

Councilman Bruce Henderson echoed the mayor’s praise for San Diegans, but saved his kindest words for O’Connor herself.

“There is one leader in the state of California besides the governor who did not panic, and that was our mayor,” he said. “She stood--and stood, in many cases, alone . . . with people pointing at her and laughing. The mayor took a lot of flak throughout this state. Nobody took this crisis more seriously than Maureen O’Connor.”

The mayor thanked him, joking that her critics “literally threw the kitchen sink and my house meter at me”--a reference to the disclosure in The Times that O’Connor had a second water meter on her property that placed her and her husband among the city’s top 100 residential water users.

With that, the council voted unanimously to continue with a 30% voluntary conservation program through April 30, despite the fact that the San Diego County Water Authority, which provides 90% of the city’s water, has asked its customers to conserve 50% beginning April 1.

The council, noting that the CWA board of directors is planning to meet Thursday to consider delaying or lessening the cutbacks, decided not to adopt any mandatory measures until after the CWA board meets.

Mike Madigan, chairman of the CWA board, told the council that the CWA may soon ease off on its restrictions. He said an expected increase in Southern California’s water allotment from the state, combined with local runoff and a healthy amount of snow in the Sierra Nevada, “would indicate that sometime after April 1 the (CWA) ought to be able to ameliorate in some fashion the 50% cutbacks.”

But Madigan cautioned: “I don’t think we’ll be even close to being able to lift a drought emergency in this town.”

Councilmen Wes Pratt and Bob Filner were similarly guarded in their remarks.

“We’re really not out of the woods yet,” Pratt said. “The real proof will be in what San Diegans do when we don’t have these rains. We’ve still got lots of work to do.”

Filner was the only council member to vote against the new tiered rates because, he said, it allows wealthy people who can afford to pay inflated rates to use as much water as they like. He said he remains skeptical that voluntary conservation will continue to get results.

“It is an unusual month,” he said. “It is difficult for me to believe that kind of savings is going to continue.”

McGrory said that, even if the CWA maintains its 50% cut, the city of San Diego could draw water from its reservoirs to ease the burden on its individual consumers to about a 30% to 35% cutback. He said that the city would have to use only half of the about 30,000 acre-feet of water that it has collected in runoff since Feb. 22 to keep the city at 30% to 35% conservation levels from now through December.

No matter what, McGrory said, the Water Utilities Department needs a “substantial” rate increase in order to continue even the most basic services. Last week, the department--which has had no rate increases since July, 1987--returned a $350,000 piece of lab equipment in an attempt to cut costs, McGrory said. This week, he said, the department has imposed a hiring freeze.

Madigan weighed in on behalf of the rate increase as well, saying that major capital improvements are necessary to give the city infrastructure the “serious help” it needs.

Tuesday’s meeting also saw what may be the beginnings of an independence movement, as some council members attacked the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District, the region’s water wholesaler, which provides the CWA with 95% of its water, and urged the CWA to look into other sources of water--or to even consider seceding from the regional body.

Councilwoman Judy McCarty said that, particularly in light of previous assurances from the MWD that all San Diego’s needs would be met, the current situation is infuriating.

“I guess we’re not supposed to be too tough here, but I am so angry at MWD,” she said. “They’ve shown their true colors. It’s time that we go on a Project Independence for San Diego.”

Councilman Ron Roberts agreed.

“At the heart of any new policy ought to be self-sufficiency. And, if that means pulling away from MWD,” so be it, he said.