March 17--With California heading into another parched year, state officials Tuesday beefed up emergency drought regulations, directing urban agencies to limit the number of days residents can water their yards.
The move is expected to have little or no effect in most major Southern California cities, which already have watering restrictions. The statewide effects are difficult to gauge, as regulators don't know how many local agencies lack limits.
In Los Angeles, the state rule "doesn't change anything," said Michelle Figueroa, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The city has restricted outdoor watering to three days a week since 2009.
Under emergency drought regulations adopted last summer, the State Water Resources Control Board ordered urban districts to restrict outdoor watering. But the local rules vary, with some cities only banning landscape irrigation during the heat of the day.
"Some are really, really loose," said water board chair Felicia Marcus, who described Tuesday's action as "quite modest."
Local agencies that don't currently limit watering days will have to restrict landscape irrigation to no more than two days a week if they don't adopt their own curbs before the new rules go into effect in 45 days. Cities with limits can maintain them, even if they permit watering on more than two days a week.
Additionally, the board prohibited landscape irrigation during and in the 48 hours after a measurable rainfall, directed restaurants to serve patrons water only upon request and told hotels to offer customers the option of not having their linens and towels washed daily.
The board also added to a requirement that urban water districts report their monthy water use, asking them to additionally report on their enforcement actions.
The state's water situation is in some respects slightly better than it was a year ago. Precipitation in key watersheds in Northern California is 81% of normal for the date. Shasta Lake, California's largest reservoir, is 58% full, compared with 45% a year ago. Lake Oroville is half full, compared with 45% at this time last year.
Customers of the State Water Project, which delivers supplies from Northern California to Southland cities, will get 20% of their contract requests this year, compared with only 5% in 2014.
But some smaller reservoirs in the Southern Sierra Nevada have fewer reserves than they did last spring. And most troubling to water managers is the statewide snowpack. At 13% of average, it has all but disappeared. "That snowpack is just terrifying," Marcus said in an interview Monday.
The mountain snowpack acts as a natural reservoir that in a normal year can hold as much as a third of the state's water supply, slowly releasing it throughout the spring as seasonal water demand rises. This year that release will be a trickle.
"Even though the [reservoir] levels are technically higher," Marcus said, the state's water situation "is worse" as it faces a fourth year of punishing drought.
For the second year in a row, Central Valley farmers without senior water rights are likely to get no supplies from the valley's big federal irrigation project.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports supplies from Northern California and the Colorado River, is expected next month to consider allocating regional water deliveries, as it did during the 2007-09 drought. That will have a ripple effect throughout the Southland as local agencies react, probably by increasing water rates and adopting stronger conservation measures.
In coming months, Marcus said, the board will discuss additional actions it may take if local agencies don't ramp up conservation efforts. Those steps could include making the emergency restrictions permanent, requiring water districts to perform leak audits and setting targets for per capita water use that would vary according to climate zones.
The latter, Marcus acknowledged, would be difficult to enforce. That's "why we fervently hope the agencies step up," she said.
