LOS ANGELES — Environmental attorney Cecilia Estolano envisions the day when ubiquitous grassy lawns are a thing of the past in urban California neighborhoods.
Those lawns would be replaced by drought-resistant plants creating a much more colorful urban landscape than the current sea of lawns in the state's urban areas, Estolano said.
The change Estolano envisions is one that Gov. Jerry Brown and other state leaders have been pushing. Brown released an executive order April 1 requiring mandatory water use reductions for the state's residents, to reduce water consumption by 25%.
Lester Snow, executive director of the California Water Foundation, said the governor's mandate follows a call to the state's residents to reduce consumption by 20% last year, which was largely unsuccessful.
The decline in consumption has been less than 5% statewide, Snow said.
Estolano first saw a vision of the Golden State's future when she visited Melbourne, Australia in 2010 and 2011 as a member of two-year Blue Ribbon Committee set up by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s board to look at a long-term strategy for MWD.
Measures taken in Australia are referenced frequently in discussions of California's current water crisis.
The 12-year drought that began in 2001 in Australia and reached epic proportions by 2003 resulted in systemic changes in both water use and the country's infrastructure with costs estimated to be as high as $80 billion.
Prior to its so-called Millennium drought, Australia had relied solely on water stored behind dams for agriculture and consumption. When impacts of the drought firmly took hold in 2003, Australia rolled out programs to counteract its effects.
Those solutions included using recycled sewage water, (a technique Orange County, Calif., adopted in the mid-2000s that has not gone statewide), and encouraging use of so-called greywater runoff, such as that from kitchen and bathroom sinks, for non-drinking purposes such as garden irrigation.
Consumers were encouraged to recycle to the point that most Australian homes are now built with water storage tanks filled by rain gutters. Desalination plants were also built with varying success.
When Snow, a former head of the California Natural Resources Agency, made a statement at a state Assembly hearing on February 10 that the $7.1 billion water bond measure state voters approved in 2014 would just be a down payment on what California needs to build out needed water infrastructure, few seemed surprised.
He quoted sources such as the Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state a "D" in its report card for the state of its water infrastructure, saying California needs to spend $6 billion to $12 billion a year for five years to catch up.
Up to $72 billion in expenditures on water-related infrastructure sounds like a hefty sum in a state in which the $61 billion cost of a high-speed rail project has been roundly criticized. Particularly since the state has spent the past six years battling its way back from what Brown has called a "mountain of debt."
California may not need to spend what Australia did to solve its water crisis, but Snow repeated in an interview Wednesday his contention that the water bond is a mere down payment.
"We are going to have to make sustained and substantial investments," Snow said.
California should look to both the successes and failures in Australia as it plans for the future, he said.
California's problem is that since the existing water infrastructure was constructed in the 1960s, cities and water districts have completed projects on a one-off basis, but nothing comprehensive has been done on the entire system since the 1960s — when Jerry Brown's father Pat Brown was in the governor's office, Snow said.
"We have seen cities and water districts invest in the pipeline and water stations, but they have not invested adequately in the water resource itself," Snow said.
The best example is that "here we are in the midst of a drought and cities are discharging 1 million acre feet of water into the ocean," he said.
The state needs to adopt a fee or come up with an ongoing revenue stream to pay for the needed infrastructure, said Snow, adding that the state cannot continue to make improvements when it has a drought crisis and then move funding sources to other needs when it rains.
Estolano, who headed the former Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, was the deputy chair of the energy and environment group for the Obama presidential transition's Environmental Protection Agency review team.
When she was in Melbourne during her time on the MWD board, the daily newspaper there reported levels in the reservoirs on a daily basis in similar fashion to how air quality is reported in Los Angeles. She expects California — now in its fourth year of drought — could see a similar focus on water resources.
Brown announced the
"I found the governor standing in the Sierra Mountains, which was completely dry, with not a snow flake on the ground, to be extremely powerful," Estolano said. "I think it caught a lot of attention and we will see a lot more activity as a result."
In a normal year, that non-existent snowpack in California's mountains replenishes the reservoirs that supply water to the agriculture-rich Central Valley and to homes and businesses in Southern California.
The vision of the governor standing on dry ground in the Sierras has been juxtaposed against a steady stream of news stories about Central Valley residents whose wells have run dry, forced to receive rations of water delivered by pump trucks, and photos of ponds surrounded by cracked ground in empty lake beds.
On Tuesday, the State Water Resources Water Control Board announced it would penalize cities that fall short of Brown's mandate by increasing the amount they are required to conserve going forward.
The drought is forcing state leaders to respond to immediate needs for water even as it tries to formulate a long-range plan to replace or augment the water infrastructure first constructed more than 50 years ago.
State leaders continue to lay the groundwork for that long-range plan against a backdrop of water shortage problems and the realization from water and snow measurements that the state could be headed for its fifth year of drought.
"I think we are going to see more consultation with Australia over the coming months," Snow said.
One thing Snow said he would like to see from those consultations is the question posed to Australians as to what they wish they would have done differently when they were in the middle of their drought and trying to solve a crisis and plan for the future.
"They got urban use levels down to half of previous levels," Snow said. "Even if we can't achieve the same, it shows the potential, particularly with recycling and water reuse."
As California looks to Australia, Snow contends the question to ask is what do that country's leadership think they could have done better in the middle of the drought — both to plan for the future and deal with the current crisis.
"The bonds have funding for investing in a portfolio approach of investing broadly, but we need to sustain that kind of investment over the long term," he said.
The current system of focusing on water resources in a drought — and then not sustaining funding for such programs when rain falls — must end, he said.
