Assemblyman Peace’s Water Idea a Turnoff in Sacramento

SACRAMENTO —  Water meters.

Throughout the sweltering, tree-lined neighborhoods of the state capital, them’s fighting words. And right now, the citizens of Sacramento are in such a lather that they would like nothing better than to throttle Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Rancho San Diego).

Peace has incurred this community’s wrath with his one-man crusade to force the installation of water meters on all Sacramento County homes by the end of the century, an expensive retrofit that would excavate lawns, cost more than $100 million and increase water bills by 60%.

Cradled by the American and Sacramento rivers, the capital has been so proud of its abundance of water that its city charter actually prohibits the meters at any residence. Unmetered water is about as sacred to the average Sacramentan as free parking at the beach is to a San Diegan.

“It’s like a birthright,” said Roberta Larson, a Sacramento public works administrator.

But, with the four-year drought, Peace has argued that Sacramento’s birthright is actually a symbol of water indifference. And, with his characteristic flair for controversy, the outspoken lawmaker has managed to push his water meter bill through one house of the Legislature, inflaming local tempers and setting the stage for a regional water war between the capital and laid-back San Diego.

On June 8, the day after Peace’s water meter bill passed the Assembly 42 to 21, his picture was run on the front page of the Sacramento Bee alongside a cleverly edited, slightly inflammatory quote: “Some of us are water hogs. Some of us are not.”

Not to be outdone, a Sacramento Union editorial, playing on the title of the cult film Peace made before entering politics, called his bill “Attack of the Killer Water Meters.”

His opponents have accused Peace of picking on Sacramento just to curry favor with his constituents, many of whom are Imperial Valley farmers with a reputation as some of the profligate water wasters in the state. They also point out that the water meter bill applies solely to Sacramento, conveniently leaving out smaller unmetered cities such as Brawley, which lies in Peace’s district. They say Peace should concentrate his efforts closer to home--like in San Diego, where the city has steadfastly refused to institute the kind of mandatory water controls that were instituted recently in Sacramento.

“It just makes the entire situation all the more obscene,” Sacramento-area Assemblyman Tim Leslie said, adding that Peace’s crusade is “absolutely hypocritical.”

“What should I do? Should I introduce a bill, now, to go down to San Diego and have mandatory water rationing?” said Leslie (R-Carmichael). “Maybe we should find an inefficient way to have them spend $100 million. It makes as much sense.”

Added Assemblyman Richard Floyd (D-Carson), “This is just a cheap politician’s trick to say, ‘Look at what I’m doing about the drought,’ which is nothing.

“This is a guy from down in the desert, that pours hundreds of thousands of gallons on their damn, rich golf courses and, in the heat of the desert, it evaporates into the air,” said Floyd, who is from the Los Angeles area.

Peace shrugs it all off.

“The majority of people (in Sacramento) oppose it,” he acknowledged. “It’s quite natural. The instinctive reaction is, ‘We get something for free now; why should we support putting in a meter?’ Probably the hardest thing is the perception that this is Southern California legislation.

“But, just because you’re from one part of the state or another part of the state doesn’t make them good guys or bad guys,” Peace said. “What it boils down to is water meters are the right thing to do.”

He also disputed the notion that he undertook the bill to impress his constituents more than 500 miles away.

“Nobody knows in San Diego that Sacramento is not on water meters, and nobody cares,” Peace said. “There are no political pluses in it.”

He said the premise of his controversial bill is simple: People are more likely to conserve water when they can keep track--and must pay--according to their consumption of the precious resource.

As proof, he cites statistics that show the average unmetered Sacramentan used an average of 291 gallons of water a day in 1980, contrasted with 197 gallons a day used by the average citizen in Stockton, a metered community with a similar climate, 50 miles south of the capital. Retrofitting Sacramento with meters would save 63,000 acre-feet of water a year, he claims. (An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons.)

“People just don’t have any way of having any perception of what they’re using,” Peace said about unmetered communities. “And ignoring the statewide interest we all have in making the best and most conscientious use of water, if I conserve my water and use it judiciously, shouldn’t I pay less than my neighbor who hoses down his driveway three times a day and keeps his toilet running?”

Yet Sacramento water officials say Peace’s arguments are flat-out wrong. Their main salvo is a 1985 study by the Denver Board of Water Commissioners that showed the presence of water meters had no predictable effect on water conservation in selected neighborhoods.

“I think they (legislators) may have a misimpression that having water meters itself is enough to conserve water,” Sacramento Mayor Anne Rudin said. “People will just run as much as they want, and then pay for it.”

Besides that, say Rudin and others, Sacramento’s water woes are decidedly different from those in San Diego. Unlike arid Southern California, Sacramento has too much water at times. The current worry around the capital is whether the levees will hold back the rivers when the drought finally breaks.

In addition, Sacramentans argue that they really don’t consume their water, but merely borrow it. Indoor use is no greater than in other places, and the vast majority of the water is sent back, treated, into the rivers for reuse.

“It isn’t really used, “ said Baxter Culver, lobbyist for Sacramento County. “It goes back to a beneficial use downstream, whether it goes down the delta or Los Angeles. It hasn’t gone away.”

As far as the water lavished on the capital’s landscaping, San Diego must understand that trees, bushes and lush lawns are part of what makes Sacramento bearable during the muggy San Joaquin Valley summers, when temperatures consistently top 100 degrees, they say.

“San Diego in July, particularly out toward the coast, is a very pleasant place,” said Culver. “While we might be using a little more water, (San Diegans) aren’t using as much energy for air conditioning. They’re getting a break.

“So why do they resent us having a better water supply, a less expensive water supply, and insist upon these meters?” he asked.

Adding to the simmering indignation over Peace is the fact that water-rich Sacramento has shown up San Diego with its past and current efforts to curtail the use of water.

Last summer, for instance, unmetered Sacramento--where the average homeowner pays $9.21 a month for his water service--managed to cut its consumption by 13% in a voluntary conservation program.

Meanwhile, metered San Diego--where water now costs the average household $16.80 a month--and its suburbs could muster only a 4% savings during a voluntary program in 1988. In 1989, the San Diego area didn’t even have a voluntary conservation program, said a spokesman with the San Diego County Water Authority.

Now, as the drought stretches painfully into its fourth year, metered San Diego has drawn criticism from surrounding cities and Peace himself for declining to join the growing list of municipalities that have enacted mandatory controls. Instead, it has opted for a voluntary public relations strategy that, in its first two weeks, has shown an estimated water reduction of 15%, said the water authority spokesman.

In Sacramento, officials have taken a harder line with a mandatory program aimed at saving 20%. The program, which went into effect June 1, requires residents to water lawns no more than three times a week and prohibits hosing down outside pavement except for health reasons. A squad of six “water cops” have been hired to cite scofflaws, who could see their monthly bill jump fivefold after their third infraction.

Peace himself agrees that San Diego’s softer approach to conservation is “stark-raving bizarre,” and says revenge-minded colleagues have already warned that they will amend the measure to shove mandatory rationing down the city’s throat. He has hastened to add that the city of San Diego is not within his district.

But Peace has no way of avoiding what has been the favorite target of Sacramentans angered by the meter bill: the Imperial Valley farmers and their irrigation district.

In 1981, the state Department of Water Resources investigation concluded that the Imperial Irrigation District was guilty of wasting huge amounts of water through mismanagement, unlined earthen canals and the failure to reclaim water left over from the extensive farming operations.

Three years later, the state ordered the district to adopt conservation programs to save 438,000 acre-feet a year. Since an acre-foot is enough to supply the needs of two typical California households a year, the Imperial Valley savings would be the equivalent of the water used by 875,000 homes--more than twice the size of the city of Sacramento.

The rural district resisted state orders, however, and the issue has gone to court twice. In April, 1988, a San Diego Superior Court judge

ruled that the IID’s “failure to implement additional water-conservation measures is unreasonable” and a violation of the state constitution.

The impasse was broken last December when the the Metropolitan Water District, which services San Diego and five other Southern California counties, announced it would spend $220 million for conservation projects in the rural irrigation district. In exchange, the Imperial water agency has agreed to export to the MWD about 106,000 acre-feet of the water conserved--a figure that is still only about 25% of the potential savings.

The Sacramento Union’s June 11 editorial pulled no punches about the Imperial Valley farmers and Peace.

“While Assemblyman Peace piously claims his bill is needed to increase water conservation, the fact is that this Sacramento-bashing bill will play well in his Southern California district and in nearby districts,” it said. “Never mind that farmers in Imperial County, which constitutes the major portion of Peace’s 80th District, have been some of the biggest water wasters in California because of a refusal to line irrigation canals with cement. (They are finally being forced to do so by various agencies.)

“By sticking something to Sacramento County, Peace probably hopes to deflect some of the criticism from his constituents who have been pressured by the state to do more to conserve water,” it said.

Peace said the current board members of the irrigation district are committed to improve water conservation and sell off what they save. He called the controversy and lawsuits “ancient history.”

As far as Sacramento goes, Peace acknowledged that he wrote the bill in such a way that it would apply only to the capital area, although there are unmetered communities in his district and throughout the San Joaquin Valley. To do otherwise would garner overwhelming opposition and ensure defeat of the bill, he said.

Even his legislative colleagues from the capital, who are publicly opposed to the meter bill, are privately supportive, Peace said. The bill now moves to a Senate committee, where critics predict it will be killed.

Meanwhile, Peace said he finds the public outcry over the cost of the meters in the capital a bit ironic, given the fact that Sacramentans were willing to pay handsomely in the city’s recent, unsuccessful bid to lure the Los Angeles Raiders football team to town.

“In Sacramento, they chose to offer $60 million to bring a football team to town,” he said, “but they don’t want to spend any money to conserve water.”