Navigating the Waters of Special Districts: An Insightful Conversation with Dan Muelrath
- jared2766
- 11 minutes ago
- 32 min read
What is a Special District? How does it Impact Me!
In a recent episode of the Capstone Conversation podcast, host Jared Asch dives into the world of special districts and water management in California with guest Dan Muer. Dan, who is affiliated with the Diablo Water District and serves as the Chair of the Contra Costa Special Districts Association, sheds light on the intricacies of managing water resources and the vital role special districts play in enhancing community life.
Listen to the full episode at www.capstonegov.com/podcast or by going to "The Capstone Conversation" on your favorite podcast app or Youtube.
### Understanding Special Districts in California
Special districts, as Dan explains, are unique government entities that manage specific functions within a community and differ from cities and counties. Whether it's transportation, sewer systems, or water management, these districts are crucial in maintaining essential services that directly impact daily living. Dan's leadership at the Diablo Water District and the Contra Costa Special Districts Association underscores the critical importance of collaboration among entities to share resources and address community needs effectively.
### Dan Mure's Path to Leadership
Dan shares his journey from his formative years at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he laid a foundation in agricultural business and water science, to his career evolution, culminating in key positions in various water districts. His experience underscores the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in navigating the complex landscape of water management.
### The Role of Special Districts: Focused and Efficient
Emphasizing the efficiency of special districts, Dan notes their ability to maintain a singular focus on specific functions, such as water or sewer management. This focus enables these districts to address mission-critical tasks with agility, often outpacing larger city administrations bogged down by broader responsibilities. By concentrating their efforts, special districts ensure that essential services, such as water distribution, remain uninterrupted and effective.
### Challenges and Initiatives in Water Management
The podcast delves into significant challenges and initiatives in the water sector, particularly in response to California’s sustainability goals. Diablo Water District is actively embracing technological advancements, such as upgrading water meters to provide real-time data and enhance customer engagement. Dan highlights the district’s commitment to both reducing non-revenue water through advanced leak detection systems and promoting water-saving measures among consumers.
### Building a Sustainable Future
Dan proudly shares Diablo Water District’s sustainability initiatives, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2027. From installing solar power systems to transitioning vehicle fleets to renewable energy, these measures emphasize a long-term commitment to environmental stewardship. Such initiatives align with broader state mandates, demonstrating how districts can lead in both resource conservation and operational efficiency.
### Closing Thoughts: A Call for Awareness and Engagement
In concluding the conversation, Jared and Dan reflect on the importance of community awareness and engagement in water conservation efforts. Given that water use is heavily tied to outdoor irrigation, Dan encourages consumers to focus on optimizing irrigation systems, perhaps through smart controllers that adjust watering based on real-time weather conditions.
This insightful podcast episode not only uncovers the operational dynamics of special districts but also serves as a reminder of the proactive measures necessary to ensure sustainable resource management. By understanding the role and challenges of special districts like the Diablo Water District, communities can better appreciate and participate in initiatives that safeguard their essential services.
Here are some hashtags you might consider for your blog post:
10. #ClimateAction
11. #WaterTechnology
12. #PublicUtilities
13. #WaterEfficiency
15. #LocalGovernment
16. #WaterDistricts
23. #JaredAsch
For the Full Transcript, view below
Today we are gonna learn about special districts, government agencies in California that operate different from cities and counties. They govern our water, our transportation, our sewer, our sanitation, and a whole lot of other things in between.
And this will be a dual part episode. We are also gonna have. Some background about water and where things currently stand in the state from a water expert. So today I am joined by Dan Mure from the Diablo Water District. He is also the current chair of the Contra Costa Special Districts Association.
That is not one, I could say five times fast. But welcome Dan, and thank you for joining me.
Thank you for having me here today. Those are all mouthfuls and we have acronyms for every single one of those. If we wanna hear 'em,
Tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got to these two positions today.
Okay. Yeah. If we go back in the way back time machine, I always like to give a shout out to my college days to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that gave me the foundation and footing to really get into the government realm. So I got a bachelor's degree there and agricultural business concentrated in policy and had a minor in water science.
So at the time I never knew that my minor was gonna be where I hinged my entire career, but it was. While I was also there, I also got my MBA with an emphasis in finance. So all that kind of stacked on the academic side to lead me to where I'm today. But let's just say I graduated from there 22 years ago.
I had no clue that this industry existed where I'd land, what I would do in life. So it's definitely been a journey. I've been at a few different water districts or full service cities throughout my career. My first water district experience was at room municipal water district, and so just cutting my teeth there, doing plan reviews and such.
Then went to Santa Rosa Water. They're actually part of the full service city for City of Santa Rosa, and I was there for quite a sense. And then got my first role as general manager at Valley of the Moon Water District, which is in the Sonoma Valley. And then six and a half years ago already I've been here at Diablo Water District as a general manager.
So that's a quick flyover of how I physically got here. But yeah, open to any other questions?
We're gonna come back for those who are interested in water, we're gonna talk about that in the second half of this episode. Talk about. What is a special district here in California and let's first define what it is, give an example or two, and then we could talk a little bit more about the association there.
As you alluded to in the intro, that special districts typically do something that a full service city or a neighboring city may or may not do. So in our East Bay area, in the Far East Bay, there's cities out here that are full service that they do water, sewer but they might not do vector control.
So mosquito and vector control, that is a special district. There's other municipalities that are not per se, full service. And let's say that there was water or sanitary needs before the city was incorporated. That's a case here at Diablo Water District. We've been around for over 70 years, and the actual town of Oakley, that makes up a majority of our area, as significantly shorter.
Tenure existence. So that's why we end up with special districts that may exist where a full service city already is. Or you may end up with something like East Bay Mud, east Bay Municipal Utilities District. It spans multiple jurisdictions. So you typically will find it more in these specialty areas as you hit a bunch of them up front.
There's water, there's sewer, it can be some of them have special police districts, fire districts. Cemetery districts, reclamation districts. So just reading all those, we have members almost in every category of that in the Contra Costa Special District Association.
How many do you know offhand, how many members are in the Special District Association in Contra Costa?
We have right about 25 members. Okay. And it makes up all the larger special districts that the public would think of or the public would interface with, whether you are, going to East Bay Regional Parks whether it's East Bay Municipal Water District or Utility District or it's your local water purveyor or Contra Costa Water District on the wholesale level.
And then you get down, some of the ones that we. Don't tend to have as members of small reclamation districts, which are in charge of, keeping water off of small islands or small plots of land that have some sort of levy or pump protection that maybe there's only one or two or 10 people that are benefit from that reclamation district.
But we do have the major reclamation districts are part of our association.
Interesting. And is it just that they're so small, they don't see the benefit of the association or don't have staff really all volunteer driven?
Yeah. Yeah, it'd be both of the above. When we look at this last couple years with the, with C-C-S-D-A, that'll be an acronym to get us through it quicker.
With Country Costa Special District Association, we have been doing a membership drive trying to add value where we can to these other special districts. And you hit it right on that some of these reclamation districts are so small that they are landowner. Driven and like we said, there may be only a couple landowners that are beneficiaries of the reclamation district and so they don't have a need or an interest in, joining together learning what's happening at the state level.
Partner with other agencies on projects. 'cause they're literally just small volunteer driven boards that they have
And does the. Cc, SDA. Did I get that right?
Yep. Okay.
Does that have staff?
Staff is a loose way to put it. We have volunteers from member organizations. So right now you have myself presiding as the president.
We have Don Morrow, she is vice president from Ironhouse Sanitary District. And then we have one other board member at large, Mike McGill from Central Sanitary District. And then we currently have a vacancy on the executive committee. So those will be areas that we could. Anybody listening out there, we got an opening for the executive committee fun group, be a part of.
And then we also have our administrative support Shelby who is also a D Water district. So it is a member ran organization. There's no extra pay, no extra anything. It's something that we believe in and we believe and be partners with our neighbor agency. So we rotate the residency every so often.
I've been at it now for two years, so probably got a few more years of me before we rotate it to somebody else.
, A lot of, a lot to keep track of for a volunteer organization and I'm glad to know it's fun because it's been a while since somebody's come on and said, Hey, do this. 'cause it's fun.
Yeah.
So that culture matters. Tell us what is the association? It shares information. Is it tracking state legislation? Is it tracking regulatory? 'cause your agencies are so different. The regulations the water agency has are different than even the senate. The wastewater are different definitely than the cemetery side of the equation.
Tell us a little bit about what does the association do, how does it keep track of some of those regulations and help its members?
Yeah, so it's important to know that the Contra Costa Special District Association is a chapter of the California Special District Association. So we are the kind of the local aggregation within Contra Costa of special districts, but we do get support from the statewide association.
And so at our monthly meeting, or sorry, bi-monthly meetings, we will have somebody that's on staff. With California Special District Association, come in and give presentations, legislative updates, what's happening, hot takes, and then we will, dive in if there's something that's specific enough and broad enough that it covers our members, in a relatively.
Good coverage and interest, then we will maybe deep dive into a certain topic. So I would say two years ago one of the big topics was there was a push to limit how municipalities and special districts were able to raise our revenues to cover our cost. That was something that impacted everybody, whether you're a fire district, sanitary water.
And so that's one that we really took deep dives on hosted round table events, had speakers come in from both sides. So it's definitely a form for that. In a I'll call, maybe a quieter year, quieter legislative cycle. We'll bring in, whether it's banking professionals to just talk about, special district finances and how to leverage different tools that they might not have known about.
Some of these smaller members at a cemetery district may only not have any staff to it, have a couple hours a month that they volunteer, but they need this type of information. So we provide resources across the board.
Do you have dues with that structure or, 'cause you don't have staff, it's just Hey, pay for the, we just need everybody to buy a ticket to a dinner or, somebody just offers to chip in for pastries kind of thing.
How does that work?
On above. All the above. So the dues are very low to $125, maybe 120. Don't quote me exactly or quote me since we're on the podcast here, but it'll
be your words, not mine.
There we go. They're very low for even the organizations that are. That don't have the finances, it's the midsize and larger agencies have.
And then yeah, our agency host agencies, they'll chip in for the pastries or the lunch that we're doing for the day at our meetings. And then we do we brought it back last year. We're trying to make an annual event is our annual dinner. And it's also a fundraising opportunity for CSDA to help, bring in better speakers 'cause some speakers will.
Political charge. Last year at our event, we had a great speaker. It was Marco Bonia, the Bay Area sportscaster, and just talked about building great teams, and that's whether you're a team of two or a team of 500. And so we try to bring that value. We're not a professional development organization, but we want to fill gaps where we can.
It's a member driven organization, is also the really
push. Oh, and that makes sense. And I think people don't realize like. How some of these agencies work, and some are elected, some are also through city appointments, right? There's the east Bay Emergency communications division, which is all the radios for police and everything, and they all chip into one agency to do that.
I think there's one staff, but their board is if I'm not mistaken, is city elected officials that are then appointed into it.
And while that is not a specific special district, there are some special districts that have what you call independent boards, which most of us are, where voters elect the board totally separate from county or city government.
And then you have the ones that are dependent. They may have appointees that come from, municipalities appointed to the board. So they run once to get on their home board or their home city council and they get appointed. At the end of the day, we still operate similar, but as far as who's ultimately responsible to the public and the independent special district, it's gonna be the elected board.
They're directly elected by the public and serve at the public will.
What are some of the other topics that come up at the special district meetings in the past couple years that you've been there.
Yeah. I'd say that going through the. Pandemic together was definitely a, an experience that we all had to leverage each other's experiences. Some of the larger organizations, they felt impacts before the moderates and the small size agencies and, learning from them or vice versa, how to, remain nimble or some of the small to moderate size were able to navigate different things financially, staffing, et cetera.
And the larger organizations were slower to adjust. So that was definitely a. The process that we worked through there during the pandemic. And I would say another item that we have definitely been working with is like, citizen engagement. How do we make sure that we're reflecting what our communities want us to be able to provide as far as, services that still meet our core functions.
We are formed to be a water district and I know we'll talk about that later as far as my role as a general manager. But there's also certain things the public may want that fits within that, and some things the public may want that doesn't fit within that jurisdiction. So by bringing in, different speakers, we're able to focus on different technology.
Even if they're consulting firms, they're still not there to solicit the business. They're there to give thought and to give input to different areas that we could. Investigate. And so there's one technology we're looking at right now is, we do surveys to our citizens and we do 'em, every couple years.
A lot of districts do this, and it's if we want to get a quick check in on, a very specific question or maybe three or four questions, do we have to wait until our biannual survey? Or is that something that we can jump on and push out to a statistically significant number of customers, get real time feedback and avoid the plight of Nextdoor and Facebook by trying to post questions there that you don't get real community responses to?
Yeah. Yeah I think Nextdoor is just a trap anyway of a communication resource. It's good to know what's happening in your community, but you could get sucked into long-winded public complaints versus. Actually engaging those people in person and asking questions is always important too.
But I hear what you're talking about and sharing just those ideas among agencies is how are you reacting to something? How are you dealing with this budget issue? Reporting constituent communications. I think just sharing all those ideas is a key reason why you exist. What. Talk about what's different in maybe, how does Contra Costa Special District Association differ from Alameda, Solano, or even one of the bigger ones that are out there?
Yeah, I'd say that, mainly it's the level of membership that we have a pretty good uptake rate as we talked about earlier on. And we are active as far as our bimonthly meetings. Some other agencies or some other chapters I should say, they're on quarterly or even in the Sonoma and Napa to the north of us, they just combine their chapters because they're struggling and trying to.
To make 'em of more value. We do partner with Alameda County special District Association. Once a year we have a joint meeting. You think the Contra Costa is big enough to get our 25 members together? Sometimes we like to cross pollinate with our neighboring county. Twofold. One is that some of our.
Special districts do overlap to Alameda and Contra Costa, so they're already setting in both realms. But then again, it's also to, to team up and get, additional speakers or overlap areas that the, we think of one agency, it might be too small. Contra Costa might be too small, but when we get Contra Costa in Alameda together, now we're talking significant population and it needs to be bigger than that.
Then we take it up with the Special District Association. The statewide association.
Yeah, that makes sense. And does the state have staff to it? I know they're all probably elected, like most associations but do they have funded staff to track legislation and put information together, or how do they work?
Yeah, they do. So they have, like you said the board of the the California Special District Association is either GMs or senior staff from local special districts or elected officials. We actually one of the directors from Contra Costa Water District, he's actually on the. Statewide board for California Special District Association.
So we do have local representation on the statewide board, but then yeah, there are also field reps or field regional liaisons. Okay. They cover multiple areas, so there's a handful of those. They have legislative analysis, have an executive director, member services they have a presence in dc, Washington, DC as well.
It does locally, but it's been big at the state and federal level is again, back to when COVID hit and the stimulus packages were coming out. Those all went to cities and counties. None of that money was available to special districts. 'cause by definition, a special district was not in the federal code.
And so that's what's been. Being worked on probably the last three years, I would say, is getting it codified that a special district at the federal level is recognized as a government agency that's eligible for those types of funds. So definitely that's why, we need the power is when we all come together.
It amplifies the voice. And I'll just emphasize around that. There's 89,000. What I call municipal entities, local, state, local government entities throughout the country and people wonder, whoa, how do you get that number of 50 states? 📍 It Really goes back to those reclamation districts that you're talking.
That might be all volunteer and everything. It's every school district, every water sanitation cemetery district just adds up after a while and it's a lot to keep track of.
Yeah, definitely. And I think one thing that. People don't realize too is that, a lot of these special districts, they're singular focused mostly either water or sewer.
There's a few that have both, or just on rec and parks. And when you have a singular focus, it's a lot easier to be mission driven. You. Rather than have the policies of, full service city that has to deal with whatever the most recent, crime might be or response times of the fire department, which are the higher level items, or tend to be higher level, more public facing than rehabilitation project for a sewer lift station.
And so it's very easy for those priorities. To get shuffled down, we're a special district. That's our mission critical, and we can tend to move faster and get projects done when we have that real singular focus and don't get distracted by other noise.
That makes sense that a sewage pump station isn't as sexy as, the firefighter calendar might be.
Just curious, is that Ernie from Contra Costa Water District who serves on the state board?
Yes.
Yeah, Ernie Alvarez, he did a podcast talking about water with us from Contra Costa Water District about a year ago, talking about where's water going and the abundance and how you deal with droughts.
I'll use that as a pivot point. Let's talk about the water district now. Tell us a little bit about your district. For those of us that aren't in the Greater East County. Tell us what is your territory? You said mostly Oakley. Tell us a little bit about your organization and then we'll go from there and talk about water.
Okay. Yeah. We are a. Special District original sole focus was just on water, on potable water. And like you said, we serve the Oakley and greater region, so we serve also knights in portions of Bethel Island and unincorporated areas to the east of Oakley. I'd say that Oakley makes up about 90% of our service area and customers.
But again, it gets back to that we've been around for over 70 years and the town Incorporated, much more recently. So we still exist as a special independent district. And I said there that we were. Originally just water. But then in 2014 when the state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act we had to respond to that.
And in, I think it was about 2017, we also became a sustainable groundwater agency. So we have two roles now providing, potable water, but then also making sure that the aquifer does not get depleted as well. Those are our two mission critical items. But, within that we have a lot of initiatives happening, a lot of investment happening within the area here.
And tend to push ourselves in the innovative front and with technology upgrading infrastructure, hardware, cybersecurity, all the fun stuff that comes with operating a water district.
Yeah. Let's talk about that. I love talking about technology in different things. How are you guys leading on that cutting edge for your district?
How are you, how is AI and tech. Shifting.
Okay. Definitely. So probably one of the biggest tech moves that we've done in the last couple years was we've, it's been a probably 15 year process of upgrading water meters that will be able to digitally report back, provide hourly updates to customers, have a consumer engagement portal that a customer can see their water usage.
And about two years ago we finished that project to where. Customers can now log in. Every customer within our district can log in, set leak alerts, set consumption alerts. So if they have something that's leaking for over 24 hours, they'll get an alert about it. If their average bill is normally a hundred dollars and they wanna set that as their threshold and.
They're approaching it, they'll get an alert saying, Hey you're gonna exceed your billing threshold. So just really empowering the customers has been our big push. So we can dive into that one a little bit technology there. So we have. Close to 15,000 water meters that all come, reporting back through two data towers.
And then it gets analyzed, on a daily basis, on the backend. It gets analyzed and our customer service staff will review If somebody, maybe somebody didn't sign up for a leak alert, but they're using five times the amount of water they normally do, we'd rather when we can jump in and call that customer and say, Hey, we know you're not signed up for the leak alert.
You have this leak going on and try to work with then rather than a month when they get the bill and it's something that's outrageous and they can't fathom. So we rather catch on the front end.
Yeah, that's, that leak detection is great. I worked, this goes back like 15 years, but I worked for some companies that were selling like a homing beacon that you could drop into pipes and they could detect leaks. And this was in a couple of. A hundred plus year old cities in the Northeast and they said, look, the problem is we know we have leaks.
These pipes are over a hundred years old. If we know about them publicly though, that's not good because then we have to fix them. We don't have the money for that. And we make profit by selling more water to people. So we're making money by selling for those leaks. I thought that was interesting. I also think times have changed over the last 15 years with more awareness, and that was, again, in the northeast and Midwest, I had that issue.
I don't see that today in California.
Yeah, and that's definitely what we hear once it comes to the East coast, west coast is that, you got two parts of the system. You have the distribution system, which the utility owns. Then you have the customer side of the meter in their house and on the customer side.
Yeah. That's if we tell them that they have a leak and then they bring back down to normal. Yes. That is revenue that could have come into the district. It's also revenue that we did not budget. We don't budget for, for Jared to have a leak at his house and us to get an extra a thousand dollars.
So that's outside of our parameters. We'd rather notify the customer, let them fix it. But then on the utility side, we definitely still have a difference of East Coast, west Coast, where East Coast, it might be more expensive to actually repair that leak than it is just to let the water keep.
Going outta the distribution system through whatever crack or break they might have. Where here on the West coast, that's definitely not allowable for multiple reasons. One is cost, 'cause water costs more on the west coast. From the wholesale side of things, the water we buy put into our system. And then you also just have your regulatory environment.
It's totally different and we can only have so much water that's considered leak or non-revenue water. The state regulates us on those items.
Yeah that's interesting. Let's wanna hammer in further on water as a resource. No, before I do that. All right, I'll edit this part. One of the things that I've noticed is when the drought restrictions come back. Which now we're not in a drought year when the drought restrictions come back, it's based generally on my previous year's usage, right? Oh, you gotta save 10% based on your usage. So why this year would I not wanna up my water usage by 10%?
Not me, for a friend, so that when I have to cut it, I'm not really cutting it. This year I'm maybe overwatering my trees or taking a slightly longer shower. Next year I'll take a slightly shorter shower. How does that work from a water saving perspective, from a financial model? Can you gimme some insight on that?
Yeah. Now when you're hitting the nail on the head, it's the messaging behind conservation, whether it be a single year or long term. So conservation to me is you're in a drought, you need to conserve right then and there. Water efficiencies is just about these small changes you make over time at your house that you don't notice as a customer any.
Any aesthetic differences? If I take your shower head down from two and a half gallons per minute to two gallons a minute, and it's highly engineered, you probably wouldn't notice if I say we're in the middle of the worst drought we've ever had, and everybody's restricted to, a quarter gallon per minute on their showers, everybody's gonna complain.
I just wanna get that as a difference. That water sufficiency is just small, steady changes over time. The consumer doesn't really notice any end use impact. But when you get into the conservation, we don't disagree that customers, yeah. If you have to go and let your lawn brown out that year or you're deciding to change your habits within the household.
We know that's gonna have a customer impact. We don't want that either. We want to provide a product that provides the need that the customer wants. I would say that back to the question of, as an end customer, why don't you just bump up your usage this year so that your base essentially is higher?
The state has finally gotten away from just looking at these outright 10%, 20% year over year cuts to us as water retailers for water purveyors. They're now, a lot of it's based off of gallons per capita per day. And so if you were already using, let's say you're efficient, you're using, in the wintertime you're at 55 gallons per person, per day, relatively efficient house.
But your neighbor next door is using 200 gallons per day per person in the winter. As a water retailer, and this again is specific to Iowa Water District, we would be more reaching out to your neighbor saying, Hey, we think there's a little bit more you can do over there. We're not gonna reach out to you that's already efficient.
And say, do even more because we're about, making sure that everything is equitable as well. That you shouldn't have to do more if you've already taught it. And so that's well. That's our plea to, don't just develop your use this year so you have a higher base, because you're gonna pay more to have that higher base just in case if we have a drought next year.
And I, I'm not doing that, but I get what you're saying is right. Like I've already at home transition to whole bunch of landscaping to be, to reduce my need for as much water and we've installed better sprinkler systems and everything to make it more efficient. In the meantime, my neighbor has planted.
More grass than ever before. And so their water use goes up comparatively to, to mine. So it makes sense that you're talking to them. And I also notice I, my office is in an area that has a large amount of. Grass that is constantly water, and I would love to see that landscape change. But you have difference between people who pay the water bills, people who change the who.
Who are the property owners that would manage that landscaping kind of thing. Tenants, it's all different, but there's a gas station on the corner here that has grass that they water and they water half the street, which drives me crazy. How do you work as a water district? How do you work to change those?
Which would have major impacts on just our water usage.
Yes, I mean us locally and a lot of, on the waterfront, a lot of water retailers have programs to help incentivize a customer to replace their lawn within more California friendly garden. And so there is a financial incentive on the upfront.
'cause a lot of people will cite the upfront cost is too much. So we have monetary symptoms there that we look at. Then there's also, you also have built in, pricing signals within your rate structures that are allowed that show that if it costs more to, for us to procure more water, then the more you irrigate, you might go up from tier one water use to Tier WA two water use to tier three water use.
So we have a few different. Tools there, but the overarching one that's been dabbled in, but it's coming down is the state approach and the statewide adopting regulations that, in the last drought, that non-functional turf at a commercial setting cannot be irrigated. Unless it's recycled water.
So I don't know, maybe the gas station, maybe your office, maybe you all have recycled water there. Those all get an exemption, in that environment of the state coming in and saying, thou shall not allow. That's also can create enforcement issues in between the water district, who is not the land use authority and the local county or city who is the land use authority, who enforces the, you can't irrigate the non, essentially non-functional turf areas.
But I see the state ratcheting more and more into that area as we move the next few years forward. And definitely. Prior to the next drought. Whenever that does come, they will continue to ratchet that valve.
So is that something that's starting to roll out now where somebody should be starting to enforce that?
Or is that just on the horizon and the state is going through that process?
I'd say being that specific about the kind of commercial nonfunctional turf the outright approach of th shall not, it's really in the. Times a drought you can't irrigate. But as a water purveyor, we're getting regulated by the state on how much we're allowed to sell within our service area, how much water we're allowed to sell.
And the state has come in and assigned each one of our customers, essentially a water budget or how much water they should be using. And even though we don't regulate it down to the per customer, we're responsible that when we take all of our 15,000 connections or 45,000 people plus businesses together, that we have to meet a certain budget or a certain allocation that the state sets and that number's getting lower and lower.
Over the next seven plus years. So that could be up to each individual retailer to figure out how they're gonna go implement it, or if you can happen to meet it globally without having to go to your business park or the gas station and say, thou shall not do that. We always like to do it together rather than individual targets.
And so what are some of those initiatives to reduce it? So you're. Your water budget, just take your district for an example, how much do you expect in the next seven to 10 years do you have to reduce your allotment by,
under the current numbers we're meeting it currently and we meet the first additional target of 2030.
Which is to get down to I wanna say it's 47.5 gallons per capita per day on a residential level. That's for indoor water use. And then there's, without getting too complicated, there's a standard that the state is applying for outdoor. Essentially, you can't have turf everywhere, whether you're a residence or a commercial.
So you have to have a balance of. Some turf where you're gonna use it, presumably be in your backyard playing sports, whatnot. City parks will still have their sports fields. Recycled water is an exemption route, but just the adage of, every new home going in has turf in the front yard.
That's been gone now for probably at least five plus years, that the front yards are getting developed with low water use, California friendly landscapes. Yeah,
that makes sense. And that's, hey, what we did at our house, right?
Yep.
Move the grass all to the backyard. So it was more place-based for the kids versus in the front where, we could still make it look good.
And you gotta do, if you're redoing your front, remember you gotta be fire safe too and move some of that landscaping away from your house.
Yep. Yeah, it's true.
That makes sense. What are some other big things that you will do? It sounds like you're good for the next five years as an agency, but what are some of the other big things you're looking at doing in your area or you're hearing others do to reduce that overall usage?
Yeah, so we definitely want to be, accountable to ourselves and transparent to our customers that, our pipes, we have 175 miles of pipe in the ground just serving. Our jurisdiction. You add all the others in Contra Costa together, and I'm sure we have thousands and thousands of miles of water pipe under streets and such.
But we're being accountable by continuing to reduce our water that may be leak from our pipes. As you mentioned that your previous experiences of dropping kind of the ultrasonic kind of basketball into the pipes and letting it travel through them and see if there's pipes in the distribution system.
All of our, not all of our pipes are big enough to be able to run something like that through it. So we actually have correlators that we go out and set on different valves in the streets and then they listen for any sound in the. Pipes, in the middle of the night when presumably there should be very low or little water used through the pipes.
And then the good thing about water when it leaks is it will make a vibration, which makes it sound. And so these correlators can pick up that sound and they can actually say between this correlator and this correlator, we think the leak is, a hundred feet from this way and 500 feet from this way.
And then we can go out and do more pinpointing of where that leap might be. So that's definitely initiative. We're doing. So we go through about 20% of our system every year. So every five years we've gone through our entire system. There's always leaks, there's always breaks If it surfaces to the surface and we know it, we're on it.
Just in this last week, we've probably had three different leaks that our maintenance and construction crew hops on within. Less than an hour, they're out there already diagnosing what we do next and getting them fixed because we know the value of non-revenue water, which is what the industry calls water, that does not go through the water meter.
Interesting. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Let's look at the overall bigger picture with water Two to, there's talk, there's the state's trying to build one new reservoir. Talk to us about supply. You can't make it rain. So how do we get more water into the system? So we've been talking about efficiency and effectiveness, use technology, how do we get more water into the system?
Okay, so from just from the big picture, and again through D Water district's lens. Is, the headwaters for water that actually ends up in our service area is actually up around Lake Shasta. So you're over 150 miles away where the water that we ultimately end up serving out the customer's meter, faucet, shower head, comes from that far away.
And that's something we try to. Still with our customers too, is you're not just paying for what's happening right here in Contra Costa or in the last mile of reaching your pipe. Stuff that we pay for when we pay Contra Costa Water District and we buy the wholesale water is their buying water. From the federal government who is in charge of Deltas, levies dams, everything else.
So from a water supply picture, that's, the biggest picture for our area. Most of the water from a surface water perspective is Central Valley Project Water comes down through the Sacramento River. It's the delta. And then Contra Costa Water District or in talking to Greater East in Greater Contra Costa area, east Bay Mud, another diverter from the Delta.
Then they also have their own reservoirs too. The question of getting more to us from a surface water perspective, I don't really see that happening. What we look for is more resiliency so that in the times of. Drought or shortages that we're still able to meet the needs of our customers within the confines of the state regulations.
So for us locally, what that means is additional development of our groundwater. So we have a, a. Relatively full aquifer here. We're not like the Central Valley where their aquifer is depleting and the ground is actually dropping at the same time. So we have significant water resources stored under us.
It's just relatively hard water. So it needs to either be blended with other treated water, or it needs its own treatment system. And so from our local perspective, that's the route we're going is implementing more groundwater. Then also implementing and using recycled water more fully.
Okay. That makes sense. And some of the criticism has been of water over all the water use in the state has been capturing water when it rains, and the amount of water that has. Flowed through our streets, out to the bay, out to the ocean that we just never captured in the system when we desperately need to capture that.
Any thoughts on that? Can you explain that from that big picture side?
Yeah, I mean you start getting into kind of statewide politics at that point of, why the state hasn't built reservoirs and the one that you're talking about, the site's reservoir those funds were passed in 2024 through one of the state bond measures.
And that still hasn't broken ground yet. So 11 years later and they're still, working through their environmental process, still getting ready to break ground out there. So I think from a customer's perspective, or not a customer resident of California, it's just hard to see that something got passed and then to not get implemented or that it's going to be implemented, but it's still another 10 years down the road.
So that's where I definitely get the frustration on the statewide level. Why not build more reservoirs? They've looked at up in Auburn building reservoirs up there, but then it's on the fault line. So they get concerned there. There was locally, there was the Lizabeth Carros project that was gonna be an expansion project that fairly recently went away.
We were not part of that Joint Powers authority that was looking at building that. So I can't really. Get into the details on that one, but there is just this, it's harder to build stuff now than it historically had been. And so that's why with, when Diablo Water District looks at it, whatever we can control locally, the more that we can actually achieve.
So if I can develop another 2 million gallons of groundwater or reuse another 2 million gallons of rec recycled water. That's definitely within our ability to do, rather than trying to buy into some statewide project that may happen, may not happen and get our allocations that way. Again, that's back to special districts.
Locally accountable, faster, more nimble, mission focused.
And there's a perfect tie in and a great way to, to end. I'll ask for one consumer tip. What's one water tip you wanna give everybody before you leave here?
Oh, just one. We got a library of hundreds.
Oh, gimme three. I don't know. Whatever comes to your mind.
What's the best and something that stands out to you.
Yeah, the largest use of water use throughout the course of a year is still irrigation. And so you're used to the water that you see when you wash your hands. In toilet clothes, washer like you touch, but the water that's outside that you don't touch goes off at four in the morning, might run down the sidewalk, might not.
That's still your biggest water use. And so we encourage that customers are either very diligent, adjust their control as frequently. Or that they adopt the smart controllers, which will actually adjust your irrigation based off of the local weather.
Yeah. That's great. I appreciate this. I like being able to talk about two topics and really tap into your expertise.
Dan Mul did I, I got it right. Dan Muth from Diablo Water and the president of the board for the Contra Costa special Districts Association, C-C-S-D-A. I appreciate your time.
Yep. And there'd be one thing. If we can get it back in, that'd be great. If you can't, that's fine too. Go for it.
One of, one of our big pushes here at Diablo Water District is our sustainability initiatives. So we talked about earlier, what is your mission? Our mission is to provide, clean, potable water and also to make sure that the groundwater aquifer remains sustainable. But we find that we can do that and still be, have sustainable practices.
So our biggest kind of push out there is that we're gonna be carbon neutral by the end of 2027. And what that means is that we're going through and installing solar systems. So the building I'm sitting in is a hundred percent solar powered. Our new corporation yard is a hundred percent solar powered.
Putting in another solar system up our reservoirs. We've switched over our diesel fleet to renewable diesel. We're switching some of the gas fleet to electric vehicles as much as we can. So we're just, we're really committed to, that front end as we know that. There's weather variability that happens whether carbon emissions, are the sole cause we want to do our part that we are thinking much longer term than just how do we be resilient today or how do we stop issues in the future and be resilient in the long term.
No, I appreciate that. You're looking to be a leader all around. What? Let me ask about that. There's a lot of state mandates, particularly around the vehicle fleets of agencies to go zero emissions are you finding you're able to get the vehicles are you that you need for your type of work?
Are you struggling with that? Is that out there?
Yeah, a lot of the, utility cities, counties are, we're all into the same thing, that there aren't vehicles out there to meet what you'll call your heavier duty needs. So for the typical, customer out on the street that might drive a Ford or drive a Chevy, anything that needs a Threequarter ton or one ton and above really isn't out there in the market.
So when we talk about going to an EV on the trucks, you're talking, the half ton trucks, the ones that run service tags. Have a valve key on 'em. We're not talking about the dump trucks, the backhoes, all those, we've switched over to renewable diesel, and so that's how we can reduce our carbon emissions from it.
'cause that that oil's already been pulled out of the earth. It's already been used once, been refined back into diesel. That's good. That's one way that we're tackling that. But no, we see it mean a ways out until there's anything in the real true heavy duty market of, dump trucks and such.
You can get some semis that are, ev but still they're not either, either really expensive or they're not up fittable to have service bodies and other things on them. Yeah. We stay in touch with the air on. Some of our member associations, we to recently had carve out to some of the water districts to say, these are the vehicles that we can't get replacements for.
'cause they're trying to sponsor legislation now to get further exemptions and just make that a little bit easier, rather than having to go through a whole variance process.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I'll ask one question. I'll edit this out. Is on your special district dinner that you do?
I might have one or two clients that are interested in sponsoring that if a, as you talked about that dinner. I didn't know there was a dinner like that, but, if they can help do something. I don't know. If you do that, let me know. Yeah. Because I'm happy to at least make the introduction and see if it's a fit for everybody.
Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. I think last year we had a good turnout with the sponsorships and we always welcome more. Some people will roll off or maybe do it every other year, so we always appreciate it.
Yeah. When do you do that dinner?
It is in March. I want to say we just locked in the date.
I know it sounds a long ways off, but when you're planning these things,
oh dude, I get it. Plus I gotta deal with my wife and three kids, like they're already putting school plays on my calendar for May. Yeah,
I hear you. Yeah, so it's march 26th.
March 26th. All right. I'll add it to my calendar and make sure I look in advance on it, but just, yeah if it's a fit and I can help great.
And if not,
appreciate the plug.
Yeah. All right. Appreciate your time today. Thank you. And I'll let you know when this comes out, but I'm looking at four to six weeks.
Okay. Yeah, if you need any other sound bites, just lemme know.
All right. Perfect. Thanks. Have a good one.
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