Water conservation efforts in California
Any conservation occurring in the city is through voluntary curtailments. There are state restrictions but it is doubtful they are being enforced in Salinas. Although Salinas is continuing an upward trend in water savings, it’s a drop in the bucket compared with the entire Salinas Valley groundwater basin.
For perspective, urban pumping from the four sub-basins constituting the Salinas Valley groundwater basin totaled just 8.7 percent of all water pumped in 2012, the last year the Monterey County Water Resources Agency posted its Ground Water Extraction Summary Report. Agriculture, on the other hand, used 91.3 percent of all groundwater pumped that same year
The report looked at more than 400 retail urban water suppliers around the state, and tracked the percentage of reduction during June, July and August of this year. The supplier in Salinas is California Water Services Co., or CalWater, an investor-owned public utility.
Water conservation efforts in California’s urban communities continued their upward trend, climbing to 11.5 percent statewide for the month of August, according to the report. In Salinas, water conservation climbed by 13.7 percent – above the state average but still below Brown’s 20 percent goal.
A call placed to Mike Jones, general manager of CalWater, was not immediately returned Wednesday. Consequently, it is not known what restrictions, if any, CalWater has or will implement in the near future.