Show Me the Water Plan: Urban Water Management Plans and California’s Water Supply Adequacy Laws
Ellen Hanak | October 11th, 2010
In 2001, California adopted two landmark pieces of legislation – Senate Bills (SB) 221 and 610 – that require local land use authorities to demonstrate long-term water supply availability before approving new, large development projects. The details of these bills, which quickly became known as the “show me the water” laws, are distinct: SB 610 requires a “water supply assessment” at the relatively early stage of environmental review and covers residential, commercial, and industrial projects (a “project” is typically a development of more than 500 residential units, or a similarly large commercial or industrial development), while SB 221 requires a final check on water availability (a “written verification”) for residential projects of this same size threshold at the later stage of subdivision map approval. Despite these differences, the intent behind both laws is similar: they aim to forge an often missing link in California’s local planning process. Under these laws, cities and counties generally cannot make the determination of adequate water supplies on their own, but must instead obtain this documentation from the local water utility that would be serving the project.
SB 221 and 610 are part of a broader state effort to impose water supply planning safeguards on a highly decentralized planning system. The proximate targets were the state’s fifty-eight counties and more than 475 incorporated municipalities that have local land use authority – forcing them to coordinate with the local water utilities to ascertain whether adequate supplies are available to support new development.4However, California’s urban water supply is also highly decentralized, with hundreds of utilities serving these diverse communities. The effectiveness of SB 221 and 610 depends on the quality of the planning efforts of these utilities.
State efforts to impose some planning norms on water utilities began with the passage of the Urban Water Management Planning Act in 1983. The Act required all large urban utilities (defined as those serving at least 3,000 retail connections or supplying at least 3,000 acre-feet of water per year) to develop long-term plans for water supply and demand in their service areas, to be updated at least every five years, in years ending in zeros and fives. The list of required elements in these Urban Water Management Plans (UWMPs) has been updated numerous times, reinforcing the core purpose: to provide an assessment of the extent to which current and future water supply sources will be adequate to meet water demand at an appropriate level of reliability in normal years as well as during single or multi-year droughts.
By and large, SB 221 and 610 were crafted to be in sync with the law governing utility planning. Water supply adequacy to support new development needs to be demonstrated over a twenty-year horizon, the minimum planning horizon for a UWMP.8 A utility’s UWMP can be used to demonstrate water availability under both SB 221 and 610, as long as the plan accounts for the increased water demand associated with the proposed development project.
In keeping with California’s strong “home rule” tradition, these planning laws rely largely on citizen enforcement rather than direct regulatory oversight by the state. Thus, the laws provide the opportunity for citizens to challenge the responsible local agencies in civil suits.10Courts can invalidate the planning documents (UWMPs, water supply assessments, or written verifications), thereby holding up development approvals. SB 610 also introduced financial incentives to water utilities to submit UWMPs. Since 2002, only agencies with “complete” plans are eligible for state financial support for local projects. This change gave the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) the mandate to assess the plans for completeness but not for quality. In sharp contrast to climate change policy, where the California Attorney General has pressured local governments to bring their plans into compliance with state laws aimed at limiting greenhouse-gas emissions, the state has not actively sought to enforce the water supply adequacy laws though the judicial process.
This Article reviews the effectiveness of California’s strategy of using enabling legislation and passive enforcement to encourage more integrated local water and land use planning. To shed light on the effectiveness of the current policy framework, the Article begins with a critical overview of the Urban Water Management Planning process, drawing on a detailed analysis of plans submitted in the early 2000s.13 It then evaluates how water supply assessments are proceeding, with a particular emphasis on steps used to identify adequacy, drawing on telephone surveys of land use authorities and water utilities conducted by the author in 2004 and 2009. A concluding section highlights shortcomings in the current system and suggests steps that could improve California’s planning process.
Keywords
land use, planning and management, urban water conservation, water rights