According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, "California's water crisis is even more troubling than critics contend." That's not exactly comforting news for a state struggling its way through a third straight year of severe drought. And by way of emphasizing how scarce water in the state has really become, we may be about to get a chance to see what the real value of water in California is these days. Which may not be such a bad thing.
The Chino Basin Watermaster is planning to auction off 36,000 acre-feet of water, enough for roughly 70,000 California families for the year. And the agency expects to turn a hefty profit in the process. Even with the rate increases it initiated this past year, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California only charges $579 an acre-foot to supply treated water to member agencies the region. In contrast, the Chino water agency expects that it will get between approximately $800 and $1,000 an acre-foot for the water it auctions, somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million in total, as water agencies, developers, and other groups compete for rights to the limited resource.
There's a couple of reasons why this could actually be a good thing. First, the water agency plans to use the profits from selling the water to pay for a facility to help replenish groundwater supplies. In an area that's been historically subject to groundwater overdraft (meaning water was pumped out of the groundwater basin faster than it could recharge naturally), any plan that provides better management and increased water supply is always welcome. But second, maybe it lets Californians, particularly Californians living in urban or suburban areas, see just how much their water is worth. Even though we hear we're in a crisis, and that water is in short supply, at the end of the day it still comes out of the tap and no one's been left without enough water to take a shower or do the laundry (though some lawns took a hit in southern California this year). For most of us in the state, water shortages can seem like an abstract idea seen on the news rather than a condition that directly impacts our lives, and it may not feel like there's a pressing need to change the way we use it.
So maybe the price increase will help point us in that direction. When energy prices skyrocketed (albeit artificially) in the early part of the decade, California responded by being more efficient with its electricity use. When the price of gas spiked to over $4.00 a gallon in parts of the country last summer, the country collectively reduced the number of miles it drove for the first time in 35 years. And just for comparison, at $2.00 or more for a 12 ounce cup I think twice about buying coffee most mornings. Now I'm not claiming that seeing the price of water in Chino suddenly catch up to what it's really worth is going to make us all fundamentally change how we use water. But the fact is we really are in a serious water crisis. And anything that points out that there is a cost associated with water, and that maybe we haven't been paying it, can only help convince people that we need to use this resource better.
***This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.
Noah Garrison is a project attorney for the NRDC.
