Policy Principles
Require All Water Suppliers to Report Verifiable Data for Median Water Bills, Conservation Spending, and Infrastructure Investments
- State policies to address drought, water supply, infrastructure resilience, affordability, and climate change cannot be created or evaluated without actual, verifiable, fact-based data.
- Given concerns with climate change, it is essential to understand how our state’s water systems and water utilities are responding. What are water utilities doing to save more water? What are they doing to develop new supplies? How are water providers helping their customers make water-wise decisions? And how are water providers investing in infrastructure today to ensure water supplies are delivered safely in the future?
- Equally important is the need to understand how customers’ bills are affected by changes made by water utilities and whether the changes are affordable. Today’s method of measuring affordability by guessing at only one component of the customers’ bill - consumption - is grossly inaccurate. Guessing must be replaced by true numbers. Water providers should be required to report customers’ median water bills, including not only how much water a customer uses, but all additional charges and fees customers pay to their water provider.
- Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive database that maintains critically important data from every water provider in the state. We suggest the following:
- Verifiable data showing customers’ median monthly water bills. This would include service charges, quantity charges, plus any additional charges, taxes and/or fees customers pay to receive water service;
- Verifiable data showing how much suppliers are spending on conservation initiatives; and
- Verifiable data showing steps taken to prevent catastrophic infrastructure failures like those recently experienced in Jacksonville, Mississippi and Flint, Michigan.
- A statewide reporting requirement of every single water utility in the state is needed to bring more transparency to California’s water systems, offer important information for water customers, and to ensure water providers are accurately preparing for the future impacts of climate change.
ACTION:
Cal Water supports adoption of a state requirement that every water provider in California report the following to the State Water Resources Control Board on an annual basis:
- Miles of new pipes installed
- Numbers of water tanks built and/or replaced
- Numbers of wells built and/or replaced
- Treatment plants built
- New fire hydrants installed
- Median monthly water bills
- Annual budget for infrastructure improvements
- Annual budgets for water conservation initiatives
- Description of water conservation programs