LOS ANGELES — Californians aren't letting their water crisis go to waste.
After helplessly watching their mountain reservoirs sink into mud, many like Raymond Lobjois have made drastic changes that will forever shrink their consumption. When Gov. Jerry Brown came calling for 25 percent emergency cutbacks statewide starting this summer, Lobjois was already there and beyond.
The 83-year-old retired pastry chef to the stars and cookie supplier to the airlines had the time, money and cresting sense of citizenship to get on his hands and knees and rip out nearly 5,000 square feet of his hilltop lawn.
He sawed Arizona sandstone slabs into a handsome pad overlooking the scrubby mountains where TV’s “M*A*S*H” was filmed. He planted 149 lavender tufts that smell nice and need the hose only twice a month.
The water supplier paid him $9,500 to rip out the turf, and that covered about half of his landscaping expense.
Lobjois still uses more water than most. He kept some grass out front and around his wife's roses, plus a pool. But in cutting his outdoor watering in half, he has done what his water district wants from everyone. His Agoura Hills home's daily summertime water use shrank from 2,500 gallons to less than 1,200. And his monthly bills in summer dropped by nearly $500.
Dire though California’s thirstiest three years on record have become, residents like Lobjois have proved how much wiggle room — or waste — there is in the Southwest’s urban water works. Californians are showing how rapidly people who spray most of their water outdoors can crimp the hose when they must. Collectively they exceeded the governor's directive, cutting back 31 percent by July, according to the State Water Resources Control Board.
In so doing they demonstrate what's possible for Arizonans and others with water shortages looming ahead.
“We should not wait for anyone to give you a fine of 500 bucks to change,” Lobjois said.
The Golden State's crisis has squeezed both the nation's largest farm output and the nation's second-largest city. It also has put water users throughout the Colorado River basin on edge.
Farmers near the river's headwaters fear a water grab by the politically powerful state; Gov. Doug Ducey has warned against using the drought as leverage to drain any of Arizona's river allocation.
"We must be vigilant as we deal with the federal government," Ducey said in a June speech before an economic development group.
Others in the water-management community said they were hearing whispers of a federal attempt to rework drought-time divisions of Lake Mead water, possibly to California's advantage.
This unease comes, paradoxically, after a string of unusually cooperative years among the seven states that share the river. At the U.S. Interior Department's direction, the states in 2007 agreed on a shortage-sharing regime for whenever Lake Mead's water drops below elevation 1,075 to start a year.
Coordinating the management of Lake Mead and Lake Powell to better cope with drought and climate change.
Letting Mexico store water in Lake Mead and help prevent shortages in exchange for some water during surplus years and U.S. investment in canal linings.
Making specific water-use cuts that raised Lake Mead by a few feet this year and helped forestall a shortage declaration there by at least another year.
This all happened because of the federal government, said Michael Hanemann, an Arizona State University economist and California water expert. Successive Interior secretaries essentially told the states to "agree among yourselves or I'll do this," he said.
"You need an adult in the room with a big stick."
Urban Californians have learned that the Colorado's flows are the least of their problems. In-state water from the Sierra Nevada snowpack has declined to the lowest levels in 500 years, according to University of Arizona researchers.
Californians raced to conserve accordingly, achieving double-digit percentage cuts in water use almost instantly.
It’s not only happening in the wealthier suburbs or in Los Angeles, which reported a 21 percent cut in July.
South of Agoura Hills and across the Los Angeles Basin, where the dollars are tighter, Compton residents are bucking a spike in water bills by letting their lawns go “California Gold,” as the state’s freeway billboards implore.
Two years ago, Freda and Eddie Stovall had a $220 monthly water bill. Freda had the front lawn ripped out and planted succulents among the new red and white gravel. The work cost $1,600. Out back she let the water-intensive St. Augustine grass go.
The Stovalls live in a part of town with hobby farming lots and have some fixed water needs. They keep three horses, each of which drinks 25 gallons a day.
But her efforts saved $100 a month, until rates climbed again. This summer she got a bill for $167.
Across Southern California — the part of that state that shares Colorado River water with Arizona, five other states and Mexico — the threat of painful fines has forced cities and water districts to crack down on waste. Suppliers in the region appear up to the task of shedding a quarter of their use from June through February, as Gov. Brown ordered in the spring.
Failure by any water supplier to meet its share of cuts would mean a $10,000 fine per day, to be passed on to customers.
California’s mandated cuts are based on 2013 use, giving users some credit for water savings already initiated since the worst-ever Sierra drought began in that year.
State water officials parceled out the slashing rates based on per capita water use, with the biggest users facing the biggest percentage cuts. The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, supplier to Lobjois’ Agoura Hills home, had the state’s highest use rate and faced a mandatory 36 percent cut.
“Our first reaction was to explain to the state why this made absolutely no sense for our community,” district CEO David Pedersen said. It’s a suburban string of towns with lots of grassy estates and some horses — even a couple of camels, according to a survey the district used to gauge residents’ water needs.
But when district officials realized the state wouldn’t back down, they did what most Southern California water districts did: They prohibited lawn-watering for more than 15 minutes twice a week, and never between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Before, residents had watered three days a week.
Those who violate the rule first get a warning, and then a $100 fine. A third offense is $200; a fourth $500.
Keep it up and meter readers will install a flow restrictor.
Solutions: What can Arizona do to assure supply?
Las Virgenes issued only a few dozen fines through the summer, but 820 warnings.
Residents got $100 incentives to replace inefficient toilets, $85 for new washers, $80 for soil moisture sensors, $75 for rain barrels.
Some residents say they're even keeping buckets in the shower to capture the first gallon or so before the water warms, and then are using that water on plants.
The result: 75,000 residents of the hilly enclaves north of Los Angeles bested their 36 percent restriction in the second month. They will avoid state penalties if the nine-month cumulative average remains there.
Despite continued population growth, the district’s total water use looks like it did in 1987. That rapid compliance with the new restrictions is repeated across the Los Angeles area, and in San Diego County, where use in an already water-wise region is down more than a quarter.
Metropolitan Water District is wholesaler to 19 million Southern Californians. Some of that water — enough for a few million households — flows from the Colorado River at Lake Havasu and through a 242-mile aqueduct to the Los Angeles and San Diego areas.
Metropolitan spent $340 million, or an average of $18 a person, on grass-removal rebates before the money ran out this summer. It estimates the program ripped up 175 million square feet, enough lawn to carpet 25 Disneylands. This will save 70 million gallons a day, permanently.
Southern California water managers estimate that a pool there loses about the same amount of water that a patch of grass covering the same space would — in this case, maybe 6,000 gallons a year. Allison and her husband, both 74, are putting in a Bocce court and some hardscape, like tile or stone, instead. They also used their district’s $2-per-square-foot rebate to remove 1,500 square feet of grass.
In all, the project is costing them $100,000 — about a quarter of it for the pool demolition. And while her husband says it’ll cut down on the water bills, Allison said it’s not about the money.
Apparently the feeling is contagious. Allison's pool-demolition contractor, David Frisch, said his handful of workers are removing about double the pools — 90 or so a year — than they did before the drought.
San Diego has seen crises before and has acted to secure its future before the current emergency.
The San Diego County Water Authority, supplier to 3.2 million Californians, weathered a severe drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s that threatened a 31 percent cutback before a “March Miracle” rainfall snapped the drought, water-resources director Bob Yamada said.
The county imported 95 percent of its water from a single source, Metropolitan Water District, and needed to diversify.
It bought enough Colorado River water for hundreds of thousands of homes from Imperial Irrigation District farmers, who are lining their canals and improving on-field efficiency to make up the difference.
It cranked down its daily water use, from 235 gallons per person in 1990 to 143 today.
It invested in a massive water desalination plant at Carlsbad that will open by year’s end and supply at least 8 percent of its water, in drought years or not. It’ll pay $113 million-plus a year for at least 48,000 acre-feet. It’s $2,367 for each acre-foot, which is enough to supply about two households for a year.
Desalination’s cost per unit is about three times what the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has estimated for conservation, or for farm economization and transfers to cities. But the sea is always there.
“Reliability is the most important factor,” Yamada said.
With these changes, he said, San Diego County had 99 percent of its needs covered even before emergency measures.
But does the state have a solution?
During times of excess water supply, the Central Arizona Project and the state water banking authority have sunk more than 3 million acre-feet in the ground for later. That doesn’t count what individual cities and districts have put away.Arizona is not facing an immediate crisis, because of its larger reservoirs, its years of planning for shortage and its statewide population, which is only two-thirds of Los Angeles County’s.
It gives Arizona the assurance that it can pump enough water from the ground to keep cities from experiencing shortage for at least a decade even if the state's share of Colorado River water is restricted, according to CAP. Still, some central Arizona farmers could lose water as early as 2017 if Lake Mead’s storage slips lower.
Arizona has bought time, but not a solution.
“The fact that we live in an over-allocated river (basin) means that we have persistent risk of falling below those critical thresholds,” said Chuck Cullom, Colorado River programs manager for CAP.
“In the long-term we’re going to need another round of investments, just like the people who fought for the CAP."
Those investments could include water recycling or even a trade netting Arizona more river water in exchange for help funding more desalination for the coast. But they’ll also include conservation of the kind Californians are after.
How, when and where to save, though, are not simple questions in the absence of immediate crisis. Is it possible to save too much too soon?
Could be, at least without proper planning, said Sarah Porter, director of the ASU Kyl Center for Water Policy.
If Arizonans were to conscientiously hack their lawn watering by a quarter, like Californians, it could just free up water for developers to build more subdivisions, she said. That would boost and "harden" the state's future water demands.
It's important for Arizonans to think about how they use water and to embrace "living in the desert," Porter said. But equally important is a statewide discussion of how and where to grow.
"If I'm going to use less water in my home," she said, "where do I want the water to go?"
In California, individuals are scrambling, but also investing in solutions.
Lobjois, the retired pastry chef, said he changed in part because he went fishing last winter in the Sierra Nevadas and found a favorite lake had shrunk to a puddle.
“The water is gone,” he said.
But he's been so happy with his water and money savings that he’s repeating the work on a smaller scale at his daughter’s San Fernando Valley home, netting her several thousand dollars in rebates. And the conservation bug also led him to install a solar power array that wiped out his electric bill.
In Compton, 36-year-old Carlos Alfaro bought a $500 pressure washer. He was using it on the sedan parked next to his golden-brown lawn last month.
“You don’t spray so much water with that,” he said, and it’ll pay for itself that way.
And the Stovalls are content to rake up the needles that their pine trees shed and scatter them over the bare patches that are alternately muddy or dusty on the pathway to their horse corral.
Like Lobjois, they have viewed California’s dry lake beds in horror — especially at Lake Oroville, where Eddie Stovall, a Vietnam veteran and longtime house painter, was raised.
“To see it looking like that,” Freda shook her head, remembering the last time they visited the Northern California reservoir. “Just running water in the house now I kind of feel bad. If I’m washing my hands, I try to use the soap first.
Across Southern California, residents and water districts have rapidly made good on Gov. Jerry Brown's mandate for 25 percent water savings.