An investigation by Hews Media Group-Community News has found that the state Water Resources Control Board, an unelected body appointed by Gov. Brown and by Senate Pro-Tem Kevin DeLeon, stacked heavily with environmentalists and labor leaders, has deliberately assigned higher levels of water conservation to water agencies in districts with seats held by state Senate and Assembly Republican office holders as opposed to agencies in Democrat districts.
Further, the investigation reveals that, as the penalties for non-compliance have increased from 1,786 in May to 29,500 in July, a jump of 21,798, 75 percent, were issued in Republican Senate and Assembly districts.
The investigation also reveals that, of the highest penalized agencies, 90 percent were in Republican Senate and Assembly districts.
Penalty numbers showed a similar pattern for August.
In April, Gov. Brown issued an executive order calling for all state residents to meet a mandatory statewide average of 25 percent water conservation.
The order required all water agencies and residential users to reduce their water consumption in 2015, compared to their actual water use in 2013, the base year for comparison.
The Water Resources Control Board was given free rein for implementing the order’s consumption reduction target and devised “conservation tiers” it says were based on average use of gallons per capita (person) per day within each of the state’s over 400 water agencies.
The tiers ranged in cutback from a low of 8 per cent to a high of 36 per cent.
The cuts were in line with Gov. Brown’s statement of “restrictions considering the relative per capita water usage …and required those that use a higher amount to achieve proportionately greater reductions.”
The findings that agencies assigned to higher tiers correlated with locations in districts held by Republican officeholders stemmed from an analysis of an Excel spreadsheet document of initial conservation tier assignments posted online in April.
The document assigned the initial conservation tiers to over 400 water agencies/providers.
The water agencies reported their daily per capita usage to the Water Resources Control Board which calculated minimum and maximum daily usage tiers, then assigned a conservation standard to meet the 25 percent average target.
On its surface, the tier assignment formula made complete sense. If water agency users consumed fewer gallons per day in 2013, they were assigned a lower conservation standard than those water agencies with users consuming more gallons per day.
With the Board’s conservation tier formula, the assignment of conservation standards should have removed any possibility of politically skewed results.
That is, until we assigned water agencies by their location of service to the state Senate and Assembly district office holders in the Board’s spreadsheet. We found a strong statistical correlation of tier assignments to political party affiliation.
What is even more difficult to explain, the findings of systematically higher conservation tier assignments to Republican districts holds true whether the water provider was in rural areas, urban or suburban zones, coastal or inland regions, north or south locations, or any of a number of other qualifiers.
And the correlation related to political party increases as the analysis moved through the tiers.
Mr. Hews may be contacted atloscerritosnews.net