A generation ago, moratoriums on new water hookups were important to the statewide land use picture in bad drought years. During 1991, new hookups were banned in some large southern and coastal California cities and all of Marin County. Santa Monica made developers mitigate new hookups by buying low-flush toilets for existing users. The Metropolitan Water District suspended annexations.

Not so in 2014.

As this year's drought deepens, urban water systems are in general keeping new hookups available. Not necessarily because there's more water, but thanks to improvements over the past two decades in planning and connectivity.

As every day's news attests, the drought is slamming agriculture, natural habitats, and small water districts that are poor, awkwardly placed, or under-connected. Wood chips from uprooted almond trees have reportedly poured in to power plants as fuel. But meanwhile, like a cozy kitchen in a tumbledown house, the urban centers hold steady. Some urban districts that are enforcing strict conservation measures are also looking at new annexations and subdivisions without blinking.

People do still ask where the water's coming from for new large developments. It seems possible, however, that drinking-water supply for expanding urban footprints may have lost some importance as grist for development debates compared with the days of the big moratoriums.

This year it is rare to find municipal districts suspending new water connections specifically as a response to the current dry season. An extensive if unsystematic search by phone and Internet found only two: the posh suburb of Montecito, next door to Santa Barbara, and Willits in the parched Mendocino County interior.

Some districts, mostly small, banned new hookups long before the current drought: Bolinas since 1971, Cambria since 1990, Redwood Valley, with very occasional relief, since 1989. Customers of California American Water in the Monterey Peninsula Management District are under a moratorium on water permits for new construction and remodels, addressed in a current proposed bond bill, SB 936: http://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB936/2013.

Brooktrails Township – a community services district near Willits – is probably not alone in having no need to ban new connections. It has had 24 connections available since a state-imposed moratorium ended in 2010, but district staff member Elizabeth Simpson said there were no takers. Connection fees are $23,711 apiece.

Other districts, including Solvang and Nipomo, have discussed moratoriums but aren't there yet.

Reflecting a contrast between municipal and rural/agricultural pressures, Paso Robles has banned new private wells, including for houses, because of groundwater depletion pressures that have a lot to do with vineyards. The city has not stopped new connections to municipal pipes. Its contingency plan would impose a hookup moratorium at the strictest stage of water crisis but Planning Manager Susan DeCarli said: "That would be a long way out from here now."

In the Redwood Valley County Water District of Sonoma County, general manager Bill Koehler said the district had about 120 days of stored water. He said whether it would last depended whether the vineyards that sustain the local economy required spraying for protection from more than one or two frost events in the next few weeks.

And yet, the list of some 200 local conservation measures compiled by the Association of California Water Agencies at http://www.acwa.com/content/local-drought-response shows no large districts banning water for new development as of March 20.

So what exactly is different since 1991?

Water and infrastructure expert Ellen Hanak, co-director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California, wrote: "The difference is that there have been major strides in drought planning and resiliency investments since then. The 1987-92 drought really marked the beginning of many of the practices that have become very important for the modern approaches to modern water [management] that most large urban agencies now subscribe to."
 
In an interview, Hanak said the water year (from a statewide perspective) was looking like about the fourth-driest on record, about a "30-year drought." That is, a level of drought already planned and accounted for in long-term water management plans.

Her comments, and other recent PPIC publications, viewed the drought as a crisis mainly for agriculture, the environment, and remote rural towns "not connected to a larger grid". Urban systems, she said, were "mostly in very good shape during this drought" though it was further encouraging long-term planning, especially to increase physical connections among existing systems to allow sharing.

Hanak recently coauthored a PPIC report on "serious funding gaps" affecting California water systems, including drinking water contamination in small, poor agricultural towns: http://ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=1086. The report saw a shortage of funds for other ordinary water management such as responses to floods, storm and other runoff, ecological conservation, and coordination among systems.

In an email exchange, Hanak demurred to the blanket suggestion that urban water systems' strength might make water supply less of a constraint on growth. She wrote: "I think there's potential for things to fall more through the cracks in some places that are growing fast from a smaller base – planning and often supply diversification actions are likely to be less well-established." She declined to name any particular district as one for concern, writing that her comment was based on a statistical analysis in the mid-2000s "where we found that places that were growing faster and that had smaller water agencies were less likely to be complying fully with all the requirements of the Urban Water Management Planning Act," also noting that "communities with fewer than 3,000 service connections don't actually even need to prepare urban water management plans."

Urban Water Management Plans (UWMPs) are required of more than 400 urban water districts every five years, with the next revisions due in 2015. Large new developments must additionally meet "show me the water" requirements under Senate Bills 221 and 610 of the 2001 session.

An SB 610 "Water Supply Assessment" is required for any project with more than 500 housing units or hotel rooms, work space for more than 1000 people, business space on a similar scale, or a 10% increase in the local district's total hookups. The overlapping SB 221 requires "Verification of Sufficient Water Supply" for approval of a tentative map, parcel map or development agreement for a similar-sized project, with exemptions for infill or low-income housing. Both standards require water planning for the next 20 years that anticipates expected population increases and recurrences of known types of drought periods: http://www.water.ca.gov/urbanwatermanagement/SB610_SB221/.

Among local development disputes it is difficult to find substantive connections being drawn between the current drought's effects and projects that have had to pass reviews under SB 610 and SB 221.

Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League said requirements such as SB 221 and SB 610 are determined to be satisfied relatively easily. The laws "have had very little effect to date," he said. Despite a few court cases involving egregious cases of ignoring water supply concerns, he said developers generally have managed to satisfy authorities that a 20-year water supply exists. He said analyses for such purposes are based on "a short record" of the last 150 years, which may not reflect all possible conditions.

But like Hanak, he said forecasts for frightening drought effects "overstate the reality that we're finding this year" and most urban areas would not suffer dire water shortages.

City of Folsom

Minton pointed to the "very development-friendly" city of Folsom as the scene of a land annexation whose planned water supply "was semi-theoretical, a bunch of water wonks arguing about that." The city's main water source, Folsom Lake, this winter left so much of its lake bed exposed that tourists wandered the temporary mudflats admiring ruins from the Gold Rush: http://bit.ly/1fGZD82.

Folsom's South of Highway 50 annexation covers land in which developer Angelo Tsakopoulos was a major initial investor. The 2010 UWMP predicted this "Folsom Plan Area" (FPA) would gain population from zero in 2010 to 24,335 in 2035. Water supply was important in local controversy over the annexation, including a contentious 2004 election season. That year voters approved developer-sponsored Measure W, which allowed the annexation if existing residents' water rights and rates were protected.

The FPA passed its SB 610 review around 2009. Folsom then planned to serve the new area by purchasing water rights from the Natomas Central Mutual Water Co.: http://bit.ly/PVtnTL; http://bit.ly/1gEsh3F. The Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCo) approved the annexation in January 2012.

Later in 2012, plans for the FPA's water supply shifted. City spokeswoman Sue Ryan responded to questions about that by sending the first 100 pages of a staff report supporting two approval resolutions that the City Council passed in December 11, 2012. (The report is downloadable from Item 8a on the 12/11/12 agenda at http://www.folsom.ca.us/agendas/.) The resolutions agreed that instead of using the Natomas water rights purchase to bring water from the Sacramento River (which had run into "uncertainties" about Bureau of Reclamation approval), an existing water entitlement would be transferred south from the East Area and supplemented with water saved through conservation while the developers paid for new infrastructure. The East Area's demand would be met with conservation savings and, if necessary, water purchases based on "a Sacramento County Water Agency contract with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, known as the Fazio Water Supply."

As of summer 2013 the Sacramento Bee reported the developers would spend some $52 million to move and treat water for new properties out of the city's existing supply: http://bit.ly/1ggUvaD. There was an indignant discussion about that on the Tomatopages community site at http://bit.ly/1hK52I3, especially asking if the transfer of water rights infringed Measure W, but that's where the matter appears to have rested.

Marcus Yasutake, who became Folsom's environmental and water resources director in summer 2013, described the year's drought, not as an all-out disaster, but as a data point and opportunity to teach conservation habits. In an interview that did not address technicalities or politics, he said the city was not in a situation to suspend new permits or connections. "Doesn't mean we won't ever be."

He said, "I'm sure at some point in time 2013 will be included as a drought year from a planning perspective because we haven't gone through anything like 2013". He said "typically people look to the '76-'77 years," which at the time were "the worst on record, and now we have something that was even below that. So, the [UWMP] requires us to look at those drought type of years and to identify reduction or other supply alternatives."

He said conservation measures under the 2010 UWMP included finding and patching leaks -- locally difficult because water easily seeps through cobbles left by Gold Rush dredging -- and an end to unmetered flat-rate water supply. Residential water meters began use in January 2013.

Asked if there were any concerns about the water promises made in the annexation approval process being kept, Yasutake said it would take a drought years worse than the current one to trouble the water supply to the annexed area.

Paso Robles

Though facing a groundwater shortage and currently banning new wells, Paso Robles is not stopping two proposed annexations and a request for a General Plan change to allow further buildout.

Planning Manager Susan DeCarli said recently begun construction will give the city better access to purchased water from Lake Nacimiento and the city also has had conservation successes, in part by replacing flat-rate billing with graduated rates. She said, "We have enough water capacity to withstand our full development buildout," which calls for population expansion from 30,000 to 45,000.

"So as new developments are proposed, it's confusing to people," she said, because there are heavy restrictions on use of groundwater at the same time.

The grandest proposed expansion, the Paso Robles Gateway development, calls for three hotels, houses and vineyards. DeCarli said given the "heightened sensitivity to water resources" the developers voluntarily agreed to do a Water Supply Assessment -- "they didn't argue" -- and planned to buy their own Lake Nacimiento water. "It's going to be a major issue when they go to LAFCo", she said.

Did better planning help in such arrangements? she said it did help to direct new development to urbanized areas. "You can manage urban water to make sure you've got services."