I’ll comment very briefly. I’m very much involved in energy and water planning for various companies. Energy always seemed like the major issue, but water is quickly becomming as (if not more) important.
Water conservation mandates are coming. In fact, Voice of SD reported on it:
I’ve been attending some City of SD planning meetings to hear about what’s going on. Let me give you a very high-level background.
Metropolitan Water District (MWD) has member water companies (of which, City of SD is one of them… who we pay for water, of course). Kind of think of MWD as wholesalers, City of SD as retailers, and us as customers. MWD is getting 20% conservation mandates put on them. So they are passing it to the member agencies. So they are passing it along to the customers. And the financial penatlies get passed along in the same direction.
Each member agency is figuring out how to get the reductions from their (various classes) of customers. It can be a tiered rate structure, or based on allocations (giving each customer a targeted savings to meet).
For residential, City of SD is probably going to allocations. The baseline use is going to be an average of the 2006-2007 use, or the 2005-2007 use. City of SD will calculate how much of your water is used for irrigation versus domestic use. Residential customers will be required to cut irrigation use by 45%, and interior use by 5%, or be subject to higher rates on the amounts that are over that.
There will be hardship allowances for certain circumstances.
The penalties will be assessed per bill – meaning that you have to perform each bill cycle… it’s not a year-end look at how you did, for example.
Don’t know what it is for residential, but for commercial, it is going to be 2x the standard rate for the amount that you go over your allocation, between 1% and 15%. And it is 4x the standard rate for the amount you go over your allocation by 16 or more percent. That’s their current thinking, at least.
MWD is going to make their decision in April (how they are going to charge their member agencies). After that, the member agencies are likely to announce their actions by early-summer. And all this will begin at that time.
DISCLAIMER: I reserve the right to be wrong in my info, but this is current as I understand it. The City is still working the details, and I have in fact actually seen some of them change of the course of them working through it.
The City does have (well-attended) meetings on this issue. Not sure what their schedule is, but you can look it up if you’re interested.
My recommendation – start thinking of how you can save now (drip irrigation, cutbacks on your irrigation times, fixing overspray, etc).
