Last week, California officials suspended mandatory state-wide reductions in water use.  Local communities were told “to set their own conservation standards.”^[1]  This swift legislative change is a drastic one.  Last year, Governor Brown ordered all districts and the 411 suppliers to collectively cut 25 percent of their water use:  “For a year, car-obsessed L.A. went without a wash.  Suburban lawns turned sallow, then brown, until finally people gave up and spray-painted their grass green.”^[2]  In March, El Nino brought intensive rainfall that replenished aquifers; and now, mandatory water cuts are discretionary water cuts.

As reported in The Atlantic, “the new rule for cities to self-regulate” is disconcerting: “while the land in Central Valley sunk into its dried up wells, and the poor in the San Joaquin Valley suffered empty taps and toilets that didn’t flush, some wealthy neighborhoods filled their pools a little higher.”  The offenders included the “Wet Prince of Bel-Air”—a single homeowner who consumed 11.8 million gallons of water in one year; and a married couple living just north of San Diego, who had used nearly 14 million gallons in 2014 (a reduction from the 28 million gallons they spent in 2003).  The wealthy residents of Beverly Hills collectively overlooked the mandatory water restrictions to such an extent, that in October 2015, the water board fined the city $61,000.  More generally, research conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles reveals that “the city’s wealthy regularly use three times as much water as the less affluent.”

Apart from this concern over the efficacy of self-regulating water use—the issue of water scarcity in California raises questions about the state’s future.  As reported in the New York Times—the geographic centre of American entertainment and technology might have to move outside of California—if the state’s natural resources are unable to keep up with the rate of population expansion and overall growth.  Kevin Starr, a historian at the University of Southern California, said of the state: “Mother Nature didn’t intend for 40 million people to live here. This is literally a culture that since the 1880s has progressively invented, invented, and reinvented itself. At what point does this invention begin to hit its limits?”^[3] 

One of these reinventions may be the desalination market.  This week, leaders from across California’s labour and business communities expressed support for the proposed Huntington Beach desalination facility.^[4] They have reportedly asked the California Coastal Commission to approve the Coastal Development Permit (CDP)—which is the final permit necessary to begin construction.  The construction of the plant will introduce 3,000 jobs and generate $500 million dollars of spending into the regional economy; and with the production of 7,401,000 cubic metres of water annually, the plant will provide “the single largest source of new, local drinking water supply available to Orange County.”^[5]

^{Homes in Rancho Mirage, California, in the Coachella Valley. Credit: Damon Winter/ NY Times[6]}

In El Segundo, California, a $300 million desalination may soon come to fruition.  The West Basin Municipal Water District has received the support of the city of Inglewood to build the plant—while elsewhere in the South Bay, city councils, local leaders, and environmental groups have expressed opposition to the proposed plant.  The Inglewood City Council’s declaration of support carries with it several provisions concerning green standards, cost, and energy efficiency: the plant should meet or exceed the state’s environmental regulations; the cost of the plant’s drinking water should be equivalent to the West Basin’s recycled non-potable water; the plant should not use more energy than imported water; and the plant should “aim to use” renewable energy.^[7]  

West Basin supplies most of the water in the South Bay, and is in the midst of preparing an environmental impact report for the plant, which will be prepared in late 2016 or early 2017.  If the West Basin and regulatory agencies approve of the plant’s construction, it will produce between 75,710 and 227,100 cubic metres of drinking water per day as early as 2023.