that’s wasteful … we need to charge you for that.’” “Others don’t necessarily have a similar nexus and I think that’s why they are having that diffi culty when being challenged.”
A Comprehensive Approach to Water?
Putting a value on water is subjective. The drought highlights what happens when water is scarce – fallowed fi elds and small communities on the brink of going dry.
EMWD’s $222 million expansion of the Perris Valley Regional Water Reclamation Facility is the largest capital improvement project in the district’s 64-year history. The result is a treatment plant that will have the capacity to process 22 million gallons each day.
See a WLFI newscast about how the drought may impact food prices
kind of the opposite,” he said. We say, ‘Let’s give you a budget, what we think is a reasonable amount – we’re not going to say you can’t use more, we’re just saying if you do use more we are going to charge you a little more for it.” The fi rst tier is 60 gallons per person per day, assuming a three-person household. Tier two, the outdoor water rate, assumes enough water to irrigate 3,000 square feet of turf. Tier three is water use to a point that does not exceed what the dis- trict considers wasteful. The wasteful category incurs a charge six times the normal rate. “It’s a way to make people aware that they’ve got a problem,” Turner said, adding that “the bill for wasteful use gets their attention pretty quick.” The extra revenue is used by the district to fund its water conservation program. The district has managed to avoid the tiered rate challenges other districts have encountered. “We think our structure is dif- ferent, the way we have built up our rates,” Turner said. “I think our tiered rates have a better footing in that we allocate our costs based on our water supply and our most costly water supply is much more costly than our lowest cost water supply. As you move into the higher tiers we basically say, ‘we’ve had to invest in a really expensive water supply system … and if you are the one
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The lack of water translates into higher prices for agricultural products, though the impact is not as immedi- ate as some might think. “There’s little doubt that there will be increases in certain items, but what items and how much of an increase is impossible to say right now,” said Dave Heylen, vice president for communications with the California Grocers Association. “What I’m hearing is that the real impact won’t happen until later this year and into next year, if the drought continues. If the fall planting season is delayed or postponed due to lack of water, that will impact prices in 2015.” Paying more for water is in the
state’s future, whether it is large proj- ects such as the BDCP or new storage or increased residential rates. Going forward, Cantú said investing in water cannot be ignored, even if it is the “orphans” that struggle for funding. “We underfund it at our peril,” she said. “The State Water Resources Control Board is an orphan – they need more for what they do.”
A broad-based charge, which Cantú dubbed a “toilet tax” or a “faucet fee,” may be one answer, but getting it from the proposal stage to a line item in a bill is fraught with diffi culty, complex- ity and unpredictability.
Furthermore, getting downstream users to invest in headwaters protection is equally hard, though Cantú said sepa- rating the two “is a dangerous strategy.” Eggerton, whose agency is expressly reliant on headwaters protection, wants awareness of that nexus to be better known and acted upon.
Western Water
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