CJ Dablo
Staff Writer
At the May 19 City Council meeting, Signal Hill city officials adopted a resolution that will require residents and business owners to reduce their water consumption. Shortly after Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Water Resources Control Board announced a mandate to reduce water consumption by 25 percent throughout California, Signal Hill and other communities scrambled to adopt new water restrictions.
Drought-tolerant plants like this bougainvillea are popular landscaping choices in Southern California. Signal Hill’s City Council approved a resolution to declare a Level 2 Water Shortage condition. With a few exceptions, residents are limited to watering their landscapes twice a week.
There are some exceptions to the rule on watering. The rules don’t apply to Signal Hill water customers who are using a low-flow drip irrigation system or manually watering their yards with a bucket or hose with a shut-off nozzle.
Signal Hill Director of Public Works Steve Myrter described to the Council last week the municipal efforts to evaluate the compliance of water customers who are irrigating their lawns. Once a week, a city employee will start the day at 5:30am to look at the water-consumption patterns. Myrter told the council that while there are fines that could be issued to those who are deemed to be wasting water, the staff is making efforts to contact water users over the phone to address problems with compliance first.
“We feel that we have been able to resolve these issues by education,” Myrter said, “and that’s our goal.”
Myrter said in his report to the Council that the City currently uses about 2,200 acre-feet of water. The City owns rights to about 2,000 acre-feet and buys about 200 acre-feet of imported water. He concluded that the new requirements will help manage the City’s efforts to use its own groundwater resources.
“By lowering our demand another 10 percent!we can essentially not be as reliant on the more expensive imported water,” the public-works director said.
The rules could change soon for the City to keep up with the new state mandate. Myrter said that Signal Hill is considered by state authorities to be a “small-community water supplier” since it only has 2,993 service connections. However, the threshold to become an “urban water supplier” begins at 3,000 service connections.
Councilmember Michael Noll suggested that the City adopt a “toolbox” of ideas to address the future classification as an urban water supplier, noting that the City needs only seven service connections to exceed the classification as a small-community water supplier.
Auto dealerships and, particularly, a manufacturer of heart valves supplied to hospitals are among Signal Hill’s biggest water customers, and City Manager Ken Farfsing noted that there are “no easy answers” to managing the water needs and consumptions from these business customers. He criticized the state authorities at the May 19 Council meeting, noting that specific decisions on how to comply with the new requirements were left up to the cities.
“The State basically has thrown this to the cities,” Farfsing said. “[They] said ‘You go figure it out. We just want 25-percent reduction across the board.
If your residents have to cough up and! basically they’re now going to have to conserve more because you decide to keep a business going, that’s your decision you’re making as a community.’ I think that’s unfair.”
