District Drafts Drought Plan to Avoid Future Inequalities

Hoping to avoid the inequalities of 1991’s across-the-board water cutbacks, the Calleguas Municipal Water District is drafting a drought plan to ensure that all customers receive at least 80 gallons of water per person per day.

General Manager Donald R. Kendall said the plan would replace an existing policy that “uniformly distributes the pain. There are some inequities when you do that.”

Those inequities were felt most strongly in Oxnard during the peak of the 1991 drought, the worst in California since the Depression.

In March, 1991, the Calleguas board mandated a 20% across-the-board reduction in water use. In April, 1991, the board briefly increased the cutbacks to 30%.

Calleguas, Ventura County’s largest water wholesaler, supplies all or most of the water for 72% of county residents. The public agency sells state water to 19 private and public retail water companies from Oxnard to Simi Valley.

Most of the water companies passed on Calleguas’ percentage cutbacks.

Oxnard city officials complained that those reductions were unfair because their city uses less water per capita than any other city in the county.

“People in Oxnard were not going to have enough water to wash their hands or flush their toilets, while some people in Thousand Oaks were not going to have enough water to water a shrub,” said Scott Slater, a lawyer who represents the city of Oxnard on water issues.

Thousand Oaks, with its larger lots, hotter climate and relative affluence, has the county’s highest per capita water usage.

Kendall said Oxnard’s daily usage dipped below 80 gallons per capita during the heaviest cutbacks, compared to about 130 gallons per capita in Thousand Oaks.

Although Calleguas officials at the time were unsympathetic to the city’s request, the new plan incorporates the 80-gallon-per-day “lifeline” that Oxnard officials had requested then.

Under the proposal, the 80-gallon minimum would apply to customers in the coastal water districts of Oxnard, Camarillo, Camrosa, Crestview and Pleasant Valley. Customers in hotter inland regions such as Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley would receive a minimum allotment of 90 gallons per person per day.

Once a district is at its minimum, further cutbacks would not be made there unless every other district was at its minimum, Kendall said. Further cuts, if warranted, would then be imposed across-the-board.

For example, if Oxnard’s water allotment were reduced to the 80-gallon per capita minimum, the city would not be required to make further cutbacks until all other water companies within the Calleguas district reached their minimums, Kendall said.

Don Nelson, director of utilities for the city of Thousand Oaks, said a lifeline proposal makes sense.

“You can only conserve so much. If you’re at ‘little,’ half of little is not much at all,” he said.

But he noted that high per capita use cities such as Thousand Oaks also pay a proportionally greater share of Calleguas’ costs.

Kendall said the plan will go to the Calleguas board early next year for approval.

The new allocation plan would make another policy shift by putting agricultural customers on an equal footing with all other water users during a drought.

Farmers now shoulder a much heavier burden. During a Stage V water cutback, which existed for two months in 1991, allotments to municipal and industrial customers were reduced by 20% while allotments to agricultural users were cut by 50%.

Under the new policy, allotments to all users would be cut by 23% for Stage V.

Kendall said the unequal policy made sense when agricultural users paid less for water than residential users.

But since July, 1991, all users have paid the same price for water and should receive equal treatment, Kendall said.

Dave Schwabauer, a partner in the Leavens Ranch in Moorpark, said his farm relies on well water as much as possible because of concerns over cutbacks from Calleguas.

During the drought, he said, neighbors who depended on Calleguas water let their avocado trees die or severely pruned them so the trees would consume less water.

“This is something that those of us in agriculture have had a grave concern about,” Schwabauer said.