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Cities Check Water Meters

An inside look at compliance with the six-year-old Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Urban Water Conservation has found that although overall compliance by urban water districts appears to be high, clearer performance standards would need to be adopted before any rigorous certification process could be implemented. Such a process is now being considered by CALFED.

The internal evaluation, released in a July report, examined the degree to which the 12 members of the California Urban Water Agencies (CUWA) are implementing the 16 conservation Best Management Practices (BMP) identified in the MOU, which was signed as a negotiated settlement between water agencies and environmental interests. The initial term of the agreement expires in 2001.

"We're more than halfway through the initial ten-year term and there has been no rigorous evaluation of how well our members are doing until now," says CUWA's Byron Buck.

The evaluation found that most CUWA agencies are generally in compliance with the MOU and are implementing most BMPs on schedule. Compliance is most uneven for the most expensive BMPs and those requiring the most customer intervention, such as customer rebates, device distribution and audits.

For example, all agencies are lagging on implementation of BMP 10, which requires review of new commercial, industrial and institutional water use. BMP 16, which requires ultra-low-flow toilet replacement programs, is the single largest obstacle to compliance facing most agencies. One reason is that compliance is based on the cumulative volume of water saved over the term of the MOU, and therefore agencies that launched ULFT programs relatively late will find it almost impossible to catch up and meet the MOU's requirements by the time it expires. Ronnie Cohen of the Natural Resources Defense Council notes, however, that some agencies are not implemementing the BMP at all, while others are not dedicating the resources necessary to meet even annual targets. Cohen says that although the evaluation shows that some agencies have made great progress, "there's still a lot of room for improvement," noting that compliance is most uneven for those BMPs that save the most water. She adds that the evaluation points up the need for a certification and enforcement process to ensure compliance.

The report found several challenges for such a certification process, among them the inadequacy of the annual reports agencies currently file and the lack of standard evaluation criteria in the MOU. "The difficulty of performing the evaluation is evidence that the BMPs need to be revised to include clearer performance standards," says Cohen. Buck says that the California Urban Water Conservation Council, which oversees implementation of the MOU, is currently revising the BMPs.

Contact: Byron Buck (916) 552-2929

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