In response to Gov. Brown’s water conservation directives, City Hall officials are sitting down at a planning table to organize strategy for themselves and for the community.

Public Works Director Charles Herbertson said his department has met with Parks and Recreation Dept. leaders “to put together a water conservation plan for the city.”

City Manager John Nachbar is proposing to set aside “some substantial amount of money” in the new fiscal year budget that will be approved in June for water conservation projects, according to Mr. Herbertson.

“Part of that plan,” he said, “will be to prioritize what this project should be so we can get the most bang for the buck in water conservation for city facilities.”

The second dimension of the city’s plan is more amorphous, more challenging. “We will try to measure what we are using per building,” Mr. Herbertson said. “We are going back and data mining from 2013, and then we will start tracking and going forward. We are doing this because everything is supposed to be reduced 25 percent from 2013 levels.”

This feels experimental.

“We want to see how we are doing, per city facility, on regular monthly and quarterly bases,” said Mr. Herbertson. “We want to be able to prepare a kind of tracking report that we can give to the City Council to show them how we are doing. That also will show us where we need to put more effort.”

(To be continued)