Why This California Town’s Water Costs Way More Than the National Average

Started by Solar, March 27, 2017, 07:38:01 PM

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Solar

I opened a "Discussion" in Discuss and hooked, uhh, opened the dialogue with a couple of what could best be described as Progressives.
So instead of dealing with Discuss failed software, I invited my new friends to continue the discussion over here.
Here's my comment.

Quoteconservativepoliticalforum.com • a day ago
Ya know, I get sick of hearing all of this whining about water, electricity etc! It's Calif and you morons elected these idiots that screwed up the free market system so they could take over control, as in Nationalizing all utilities. That's right! You are setting yourselves up for a complete govt takeover.
Yes, it's what Marxists do, they destroy the system by creating useless laws and regulations (See EPA writing laws only congress can do) and leave you with no other alternative, so you'll demand govt take over the problem, a problem they created in the first place!

Drill a well, you whiners! I live in the sierra, I don't even have access to public water, and water wells on average are 300' deep to hit water.
You live in the valley where water averages depths 20 to 70' down and costs little to pump compared to 300'.
Point is, stop voting in Marxist Dimocrats, get govt out of the utility business and watch your costs drop.
For proof, look at your electricity bill over the last 8 years under obama the Marxist, and his so called "Green Energy" scam.

This hit piece is proof positive as to why Trump PBS/NPR funding and rightly so. I don't even like trump, but he was definitely right on this one.

This was hosted by KQED out of the Bay Area, if that tells yo anything.

The town of Lucerne in Lake County is tucked between mountains and a lake. When you drive in on the main two-lane highway, the sign that greets you calls it the "Switzerland of America." But David Cruz has a different nickname for the place.

"Welcome to the most expensive water in the whole United States," Cruz says. He's standing in his front yard, wearing a T-shirt that says: "FLAT BROKE — DAUGHTER IN COLLEGE."

"She's out, but we're still paying," adds Cruz's wife, Lorena.

In his 100-day action plan to "Make America Great Again," President Trump proposed privatization as the best strategy for fixing the country's infrastructure, including roads, bridges and water systems. That's already happened in Lake County's Lucerne and other small towns like it throughout California — and it's not working out very well for people like the Cruz family.

David Cruz is semi-retired, and says he can't afford to pay his family's water bill on his limited income. Lorena shows me their latest one: $712.70 for two months.

Two months of water costs the average U.S. household about $240. The Cruz family is paying three times that, and Lorena says her family of five doesn't waste water. They do dishes only once a day, wash their laundry every two weeks and take short showers.

These habits might sound familiar after a drought that lasted half a decade. But this isn't about the drought. The Cruzes are conserving water because they can't afford not to, rain or shine.

It hasn't always been like this. But just over a decade ago, David Cruz says, their water bill started to rise. The high cost of water has impacted the entire town.

"There's no trees, empty houses, no gardens," says David Cruz. "Pretty soon it's going to be a ghost town."

The Cruz family's neighbor, Steve Theodorf, remembers more vibrant times in the area. He's lived in Lucerne since high school.

"During the summer it was just wall-to-wall tourists," he says.

Theodorf was just doing something he rarely does: washing his car to get ready for a special trip.
Lucerne's water comes from nearby Clear Lake. But, at least on this visit, it doesn't quite live up to the name. The lake is teeming with green algae. Water like this needs a lot of treatment. And when the current water company in Lucerne took over about 15 years ago, the health department told them the treatment system they inherited wasn't up to the job.

"You simply cannot operate a system that does not provide safe drinking water to customers," says Paul Townsley, vice president of regulatory matters for California Water Services (Cal Water). Townsley says the company had no choice but to upgrade the treatment plant, to the tune of about $7 million.

"You take that cost and you divide it by the number of customers here" — that's about 1,800 households — "and you have the issue that we have today," Townsley says.

"The alternative is to ignore the infrastructure," he adds, which is the choice hundreds of small water systems around California are being forced to make because they can't come up with the money to make improvements.

As many as 160,000 Californians get their water from a company that has failed to meet water quality standards in recent years.

But Cal Water happens to be one of the largest private water companies in the West, so it can come up with the money upfront, usually from investors. And it's up to customers in Lucerne to pay it back.

"An investor in a company like Cal Water is investing in infrastructure," says Townsley. "The money has to come from somewhere."

It might even be coming from you, if you've got a retirement fund. Some major mutual funds invest in Cal Water.

If it were a public company, money for big projects would come from bonds, Townsley explains. But people vote on bonds. The residents of Lucerne don't get a vote. Instead, they get one chance every three years to plead their case at a public hearing with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

"I took the first damn shower in one month today," Lucerne resident Samuel Bonaccorso told a CPUC judge in front at the latest packed public hearing in December. "Do you know what that feels like?"

After the hearing, the water company agreed to consolidate Lucerne's costs with other nearby water districts — another option that's only available to a large company like Cal Water.

That brings down the monthly water bill for people like Bonaccorso from three times the national average to double what most Americans pay for their water.
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zewazir

$7M in improvements, probably $6.5M of which were over priced and/or unnecessary government engineering mandates.

Want affordable, potable water? Ask the Israelis. From desalinization plants to treating all kinds of contaminates - including every color algae in existence - Israeli scientists and engineers have found ways of providing water inexpensively to turn their desert into an agricultural haven.

Solar

Quote from: zewazir on March 27, 2017, 10:15:27 PM
$7M in improvements, probably $6.5M of which were over priced and/or unnecessary government engineering mandates.

Want affordable, potable water? Ask the Israelis. From desalinization plants to treating all kinds of contaminates - including every color algae in existence - Israeli scientists and engineers have found ways of providing water inexpensively to turn their desert into an agricultural haven.
Sadly we're dealing with progressives here in ca.
But it's not about supplying cheap clean affordable water, it's about control over the populace, otherwise, they wouldn't be dumping roughly 70% of our fresh water into the ocean to support an invasive species and faux ecosystem.
Israel proves desalination can be done cheaply with stability, but then, that would require Ca. to shit can their Utopian nonsense of green energy and go nuclear.
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zewazir

Quote from: Solar on March 28, 2017, 04:40:54 AM
Sadly we're dealing with progressives here in ca.
But it's not about supplying cheap clean affordable water, it's about control over the populace, otherwise, they wouldn't be dumping roughly 70% of our fresh water into the ocean to support an invasive species and faux ecosystem.
Israel proves desalination can be done cheaply with stability, but then, that would require Ca. to shit can their Utopian nonsense of green energy and go nuclear.
My understanding of the purification technology, it is not particularly power demanding. Israel just uses nuclear power because that is how they generate a large portion of their electrical requirements.

But I know what you mean by the issue being a matter of nanny state control, as opposed to a genuine concern for people having clean water. As I mentioned, there is a good chance that $6.5M of that $7M upgrade price tag were due to over-priced (as in putting $$ in the pockets of high profile campaign donors who happen to own plumbing supply companies) and unnecessary (as in a bureaucrat whose knowledge of engineering ends at running an HO gauge train in their basement justifying his salary) mandates, than actual needed infrastructure to produce clean water for the customers.

quiller

$120 a month for water? I pay one-fourth that in Michigan. I smell California highway robbers....

zewazir

Quote from: quiller on March 28, 2017, 12:29:19 PM
$120 a month for water? I pay one-fourth that in Michigan. I smell California highway robbers....
I wonder about that figure myself. Is that "Two months of water costs the average U.S. household about $240." true for the U.S. as a whole, or limited to CA? (or is it made up?)

I pay $43.12/mo for water most of the year, though it might go up a few bucks in August and September when we tend to water the lawn more. Highest water bill I've ever paid was $53-something, due to a popcorn fart dry summer. And because of that, I have been pondering the idea of getting my block to split the cost of putting in a well for our lawns and gardens.

$120/mo for water is outrageous.

Solar

Quote from: zewazir on March 28, 2017, 10:59:13 AM
My understanding of the purification technology, it is not particularly power demanding. Israel just uses nuclear power because that is how they generate a large portion of their electrical requirements.

But I know what you mean by the issue being a matter of nanny state control, as opposed to a genuine concern for people having clean water. As I mentioned, there is a good chance that $6.5M of that $7M upgrade price tag were due to over-priced (as in putting $$ in the pockets of high profile campaign donors who happen to own plumbing supply companies) and unnecessary (as in a bureaucrat whose knowledge of engineering ends at running an HO gauge train in their basement justifying his salary) mandates, than actual needed infrastructure to produce clean water for the customers.
You're right, it really doesn't take a lot of energy for processing. What does take energy is moving the water, especially considering it's all uphill from sea level.
From friction loss to PSI needed to lift, the amount of energy required is quite exorbitant.
I know all my neighbors pay on average between one hundred and fifty and two hundred bucks a month to pump water, though most have gardens, that's the total electric bill, the water is generally figured to be two-thirds of the bill.
We have relatively deep wells.
I do solar, so I have no clue since it's free, but the 200' in elevation I pump to my house from the spring requires 130 psi.
I'm only getting a gallon per minute to a 2500 gallon holding tank, but for a desalinization plant to be feasible, it's going to need to process thousands of gallons per minute, then pressurize it to feed the city lines.
As much as libs think it's possible, solar won't work. :biggrin:
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Solar

Quote from: quiller on March 28, 2017, 12:29:19 PM
$120 a month for water? I pay one-fourth that in Michigan. I smell California highway robbers....
Not just scammed, but stupid to boot.
Aside from the fact it's called "Lake County" for a reason, there's a shitload of groundwater just below the surface.
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mdgiles

You're right, they do want you out, and Lake Country reduced to ghost towns: they need to conserve all the water for all the "important" people who live in the coastal cities.
"LIBERALS: their willful ignorance is rivaled only by their catastrophic stupidity"!