Water Conservation Efforts Begin to Pay Off in Southland

Beaten up legally and politically, Southern California water agencies seem to have gotten the message: They are saving large quantities of water, with the once widely condemned Los Angeles Department of Water and Power leading the way.

Consider this: Despite a population increase in Los Angeles of nearly 1 million since 1970, a jump of 32%, residential and business customers last year used virtually the same amount of water as they did 29 years ago.

Or this: Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District estimates that through conservation and recycling, its 27 member agencies spread from Ventura to San Diego have reduced Southern California’s need for imported water by 710,000 acre-feet annually.

With the humble ultra-low-flush toilet emerging as the symbol of maturing water conservation practices that began tentatively in the early 1990s, Los Angeles water planners say that they can meet the city’s needs over the next 20 years simply by making better use of the water they now have.

Los Angeles is not alone. Other water agencies, like the MWD, the cities of San Diego, Santa Monica and Long Beach, and the Irvine Ranch Water District in Orange County, to name a few, also report dramatic results.

That is not to say that Southern California’s historic water problems are gone for good. Conservation efforts in many cases have just been enough to keep up with population growth. With the population continuing to grow, it remains to be seen how many opportunities are left for dramatic savings.

“There is just so much you can squeeze out of the system,” said Greg Thomas, with National Heritage, a nonprofit environmental consulting firm. “Urban demand is going to grow, no matter how heroic the efforts to conserve are.”

But the successful conservation efforts have at least temporarily freed Southern California water agencies from the challenge of finding ever deeper, wider aqueducts to carry water south from Northern California.

With some agencies, like the DWP, embracing the conservation ethic with gusto, conservation strategies have ushered in an “era of good feeling” between some water hungry urban areas and environmentalists, said Frances Spivy-Weber, executive director of the 15,000-member Mono Lake Committee, which began its legal fight with the DWP 20 years ago.

Known for decades as an environmental scourge because of the way it plundered primordial Mono Lake and the Owens Valley for water to keep faucets running in Los Angeles, the DWP, as unlikely as it may seem, has become a model to some.

“The environmental community is saying, ‘Try to use the Los Angeles example,” said Spivy-Weber. “DWP is now the good example, instead of the bad example.”

Reciting Los Angeles’ new mantra, S. David Freeman, the conservationist-minded head of the DWP, said: “The huge new source of water for the city of Los Angeles was the water we were wasting.”

New Toilets, Recycling Plants

The appointment of Freeman, a longtime antinuclear, pro-conservationist energy executive, by Mayor Richard Riordan helped cement the emerging picture of Los Angeles as an environmental good guy. Just before taking over the DWP, Freeman managed the start-up of California’s cutting edge electrical power exchange system that created a competitive marketplace for electricity.

“The Department of Water and Power is one of the great iconic villains of the environmental movement,” said Ralph Cavanagh, an environmental attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. At times, Cavanagh said, DWP seemed bent not only on draining Mono Lake, but “having designs on all the available water in the northwestern quadrant of the United States.”

“We are at risk now of [Freeman] destroying its symbolic value to the movement,” he continued. “No one will remember what we were up against for so many years.”

City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who drafted several water conservation ordinances, said water saving policies are reaping big benefits for the city.

“What this means for us is that we don’t have to spend the money or engage in political wars to get more water,” Galanter said. “We don’t have to build all the aqueducts, and pipes, and pumps, and purifiers to bring it in.”

Instead, the city of Los Angeles has given away 825,000 ultra-low-flush toilets since 1992.

The DWP, the Metropolitan Water District and other Southern California water agencies have provided rebates or given away more than 1.5 million toilets.

The math of toilet retrofitting is simple: It takes just 1.6 gallons to flush the new toilets, compared with 3.6 to 7 gallons for older models.

That adds up, in the case of Los Angeles, to savings of 9 billion gallons of water a year, the city estimates.

The program has been so successful that state and federal laws now require that only low-flush toilets be sold in plumbing supply stores. Each time a home is sold in Los Angeles, a city ordinance requires that low-flush toilets, along with low-flow shower heads, be installed if they aren’t already being used.

But a lot more is going on.

Cities like Long Beach are making increased use of recycled water for irrigation and other commercial uses. Water recycling plants are being brought online. Classroom teachers are carrying the conservation message into schools as the result of special instructional programs. Punitive tiered rates on water usage, which began with the drought in the early 1990s, remain in many cities.

“The 1987 to 1992 drought changed a lot,” said Bob Muir, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Water District.

As an outgrowth of the drought, the MWD underwent “a dramatic shift in strategy,” Muir said. “Instead of developing water resources--dams, canals--water agencies looked at conservation and recycling and storage.”

Because of conservation, MWD planners say that water agencies will not be as dependent on water imports in the future. About 32% of the region’s future needs will be met by water imported from the State Water Project or the Colorado River Aqueduct in the near future, compared with 55% now, according to MWD estimates.

As for environmental payoffs, less water being consumed by Southern California’s large cities means more water stays in rivers, streams and lakes.

Nowhere is the story of the convergence of water conservation and the environment more telling than as it relates to Los Angeles.

To summarize a much told history, Los Angeles, to meet the needs of its growing population, bought up a huge portion of Inyo County, then used its water rights in the 1920s to turn the 110-square-mile Owens Lake into a dust bowl. This was accomplished in part by routing water into the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the rivers and streams that fed the lake. Farther north, similar practices were used to take Mono Lake, a historic and spectacular body of water on the eastern slope of the Sierra, down to seriously low levels.

But beginning in the late 1970s with formation of the Mono Lake Committee, which galvanized support from the Legislature and thousands of activists, the DWP ran up against increasingly large political and legal obstacles.

Finally, the city threw in the towel.

These days, Mono Lake is filling up faster than anyone expected or the law requires. Some believe that the successful conservation policies helped the city back off the hard line it had historically taken.

“The lake has risen 10 feet since 1994,” said the Mono Lake Committee’s Spivy-Weber. “Los Angeles used to say they needed the [lake] water because water usage in the city was going up and the population was going up. Because of water conservation and basically good water management, the loss of water from Mono Lake has not affected their ability to supply Los Angeles with water.”

In the Owens Valley, the city, at the urging of Mayor Riordan and DWP chief Freeman, has taken steps to begin to clean up the environmental damage done there.

While some offer kudos to the city, others are less impressed.

“They could be doing more,” said Assemblyman Michael Machado (D-Linden), chairman of the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee. Machado, a farmer, is critical of the DWP for being slow to embrace construction of waste water treatment programs aimed at capturing millions of gallons draining into the ocean from the city’s Hyperion treatment plant.

“They are still discharging a substantial amount of waste into the ocean,” Machado said. “The greatest source of untapped water in the state is reclaimed waste water.”

In the Owens Valley, the city has signed a formal agreement to fix the dust problems there created by the draining of Owens Lake.

“It’s been a slow process, a painful process. We have suffered physically from some of the worst dust storms imaginable,” said Inyo County Supervisor Michael Dorame.

Although Dorame believes Freeman has made a difference by embracing environmental cleanup, he said overall the DWP is looked on with suspicion.

“People don’t trust that the change in attitude is sincere. They think it was brought on by legislation and regulation. People don’t trust the city,” he said.

Elsa Lopez, who directed a toilet giveaway program for Mothers of East Los Angeles, is one of the invisible soldiers in the water conservation effort. She said she knows about distrust of DWP.

Begun as a pilot project in the early 1990s, the DWP gave Lopez’s community organization $25 for each toilet it gave away. Eventually, 65,000 toilets were handed out in Lopez’s East Los Angeles neighborhood. The program was so successful that it spawned similar programs in San Pedro, Wilmington, the San Fernando Valley and central Los Angeles.

But it wasn’t a slam-dunk.

“When we first started, people thought it was a scam,” Lopez said. “They couldn’t believe the utility would give them something for free.”

Money from the toilet giveaway programs has paid for scholarships, playground equipment and provided jobs for dozens of residents.

At the DWP’s executive offices, Freeman says ultra-low-flush toilets are used in only about 40% of Los Angeles’ homes, a number he believes can be increased substantially. He wants to see increased use of side-loading washing machines for clothes, which use less water than top-loading models, and drip hoses for lawns and gardens.

“We are just beginning to scratch the surface,” Freeman said.