These recommendations represent a labor of love that each member of our respective groups have contributed to over the course of at least 7 years and largely unpaid. We watched, attended, and contributed to countless meetings and facilitated numerous conversations with other community members so that we can understand and contribute in good faith to the quality of life for all residents, with a high priority placed on those of us who are socially, politically, and economically marginalized and vulnerable.

The consideration and adoption of the following would mean progress on behalf of the City in terms of meeting the most immediate needs of residents and meaningfully including our input in the DCP:

We demand a measurable, quantifiable trigger for Stage 4 or “Water Emergency” stage. We believe it is inappropriate for the City Manager alone to decide when we are in and out of this stage. The City of Austin, for example, enters Stage 4 when combined lake levels are 30% of capacity (.6 MAF). The next stage is Stage 5/Emergency stage is when there is a disaster–system outage, equipment failure, and/or contamination. We strongly recommend that the trigger be determined by a percent of combined water levels, similar to the previous stages. Furthermore, the triggers chosen for the implementation of different stages of a drought contingency plan, such as lake or aquifer levels, often do not take into account the relative severity of climatic conditions— an oversight that can delay meaningful responses to drought far too long.

We demand that there be a mandatory curtailment of water from the top ten (10) largest water users of at least ten percent (10%) per day that begins in Stage 3.
In the “Water Emergency” stage, the City Manager is tasked with nothing more than calling the top ten (10) water users. The phone call should be an action that happens in Stage 3 and include the notification that the City will begin enforcing curtailment. It is preposterous and outright dangerous to rely on the benevolence of private corporations to willingly cut back in a way that measurably reduces the burden on our water supply.

We demand the City be fully transparent about future monitoring plans and the metrics used to determine important thresholds for policy. We maintain that, in order for the City to make the most informed decisions possible, they must be based on the latest and most accurate information available. In order to address previous failure of transparency and rebuild trust with residents, we recommend the City create, publish, and distribute, at a minimum, an annual 12-month graph that shows water usage for all customer classes, including customers from the San Patricio Municipal Water District. The graph should be broken into a month-by-month basis for the current year and previous three (3) years.

To further address the City’s lack of transparency, we demand that the top ten heaviest water customers be required to report their conservation plans both in the City’s DCP and the City’s Water Conservation Plan (WCP).
Additionally, we demand the City publish public reports and hold public briefings verifying whether or not these users meet their goals.

We object to the City’s for-profit model utilized by the Water Department, because under this model, the City is projected to lose revenue from less water usage thereby penalizing conservation instead of incentivizing water conservation by all users. The City should counteract this by removing the optional surcharge exemption fee for heavy volume water users and instead implement mandatory, tiered pricing for high volume consumers.

In Section 16.9 of the DCP, it states pro rata allocation preparations should begin in Stage 2. This means the City should have already started limiting industrial and wholesale customer water use fairly, but have failed to do so even as we are headed toward Stage 4. We are demanding immediate and retroactive enforcement of these pro rata allocations. Used correctly, this code could be monumental in terms of conserving our dwindling water supply. If the allocations are not implemented, the water department should be transparent about their reasoning, citing the most accurate information available.