Implementation of the Borrego Water District’s Groundwater Mitigation Policy

 

At its meeting on 22 June 2005, the Borrego Water District (BWD) Board of Directors adopted a Groundwater Management Plan that requires applicants for new water service to supply new sources of water, reduced water usage, and/or in-lieu fees to be exclusively used for mitigation of the overdraft at a ratio of 3:1.  The Board is to be recognized and congratulated for adopting this policy.

 

The BWD now must develop a detailed implementation plan that will be reviewed in public meetings and submitted for approval to the Board of Directors.  They should waste no time in doing so.  Given the building boom that our town is experiencing, any delay in implementing this good policy risks having it overtaken by events and diminishing its effectiveness.  Implementation of the policy, however, will require that additional data be compiled and refined.

 

Some time earlier this year (2005), Lin Burzell, consulting engineer to the BWD, provided a brief report to the BWD Board entitled “General Review of Statistics on Water Use in the Borrego Water District” that analyzed domestic water use in the District.  The report appears to have gone largely unnoticed.  The salient points from his analysis are as follows:

 

Used by Domestic Water Users                                2,254 ac.ft./yr.  (734 million gals.)

Per capita Daily Use (pop.= 3,300)                            222,424 gals./yr. [0.68 ac.ft./yr]

 

Lin’s comments on the above statistics are as follows:

 

“Borrego Water District metered per capita water use is high.  It includes landscape irrigation.  These statistics seem to indicate that our customers us a considerable quantity of water for landscape irrigation.  These statistics also indicate that expanded general water conservation efforts may be worthwhile to reduce water demands in the future.  Many non-desert communities in California have a per capita water use under 200 gallons per day.”  [200 gal./day x 365 days = 73,000 gal or 0.22 ac. ft. per yr per person].

 

Lin’s figures are suggestive, but not definitive.  They represent his best effort based on the data he had available to him.  The data as presently aggregated do not, however, provide sufficient resolution to permit a meaningful analysis of domestic/residential water use in Borrego.  On the theory that decisions are only as good as the information that supports them, BWD must provide data sorted into more discriminating categories to allow a proper analysis.

 

At a minimum, true domestic/residential water use must be isolated from all others.  It appears that the data Lin was working with, while it did factor out water used on the Rams Hill golf course, nonetheless lumped together all other uses of metered water.  The latter catch-all appears to include domestic/residential water use in the District and all other uses for which the district provides water except Rams Hill golf course, thereby artificially inflating the use per household.  For example, La Casa del Zorro now has only one meter just as a single family dwelling does, etc.  Only the BWD has the raw data to permit refinement of categories and assignment of accurate values to each.

 

It is necessary to know, as nearly as possible, the amounts used by each meaningful category of user in order to:

 

• Properly assess new developments/projects for groundwater mitigation; i.e., to arrive at an accurate value for “1” in the required 3:1 mitigation fee;

 

• Determine whether domestic/residential water use is, in aggregate, excessive and devise ways of reducing it if it is.

 

Users might initially be broken down into residential/domestic dwelling units, restaurants,

 hotels/motels, general commercial excluding obvious heavy users, e.g., car washes, etc.  Further refinements may and probably will be necessary as the sorting and further analysis proceeds.

 

In addition, it is not clear where some of the other numbers used in Lin’s analysis were obtained.  For instance, his population estimate for Borrego is 3,300; but the 2000 census for Borrego puts it at 2,254(see below), a difference of 1,046 or 46% of the Census Bureau figure.  Such variant numbers need to be reconciled or the difference explained.

 

Below is a slightly more detailed analysis of residential/domestic water use in Borrego based in large part on figures from Lin’s “Review” and augmented by data from other sources.  It is intended to help clarify some of the assumptions and make more meaningful some of the conclusions in Lin’s analysis as well as illustrate the need to refine the data. The BWD should be encouraged to refine and augment the data as soon as possible so as not to delay implementation of their good policy and ensure that it is grounded in empirical fact.

07/14/2005

 

Water Use in the BWD in 2004
1 year	=	365	Days
1 Acre/ft*	=	325,851	Gals.
BWD Customers		1,757	meters
BWD Population		3,300	persons	BWD est?
BWD Population		2,535	persons	US Census    (2000)
Ave. U.S. household		3.18	persons	US Census Bureau
Domestic water use		2,254	ac.ft./yr	In 2004
Daily use per capita		609.77	Gals.
Use per capita/yr.		222,566.11	Gals./Yr.
	Or	0.68	ac.ft./yr
Use/Hshld		1.28	ac.ft./yr
Daily use per hshld.		1,939.07	Gals.
Annual use per hshld.		707,760.22	Gals.
	Or	2.17	ac.ft./yr
(BWD Customers)  x		(Annual use per hshld.)  =			3,816.27	ac.ft./yr
Average B.S. household			1.88	persons
Per capita water use in non-desert CA communities					200.00	gal/day
					73,000.00	gal/yr
					0.22	af/yr
Household water use in non-desert CA communities					0.71	af/yr based on census figure for ave. household size
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*1 acre foot of water is generally assumed to be sufficient for 2 households for one year.