Santa Cruz marks 2015 as lowest water usage in fifty years

The numbers are in for water conservation in the City of Santa Cruz.

The City’s Water Department said Friday that Santa Cruz used about 180 million gallons less in 2015 than in 2014. The City has not seen water numbers this low since 1965.

The water decrease comes after heavy water conservation efforts from residents and from local businesses.

Bobby Markowitz is a landscape architect at Earthcraft Landscape Design in Santa Cruz. He designs and installs rain harvesting equipment, which collect rain water for irrigation. Markowitz said the sky’s-the-limit for this type of environmental technology.

“It is limitless,” Markowitz said, “I feel we would not be in this crisis situation if people were educated and learned about capturing the water.”

It is rain harvesters like Markowitz designs coupled with other basic water conservation efforts that have helped decrease the water use in Santa Cruz significantly.

According to the City of Santa Cruz’s Water Department, the city sold 2,263 million gallons of water in 2015. This is a decline of about 180 million gallons from 2014.

People who live in Santa Cruz are using less water, which comes as good news while California continues to battle a historic drought. But is not all good, because of this decrease, the Water Department is losing revenue.

“A lot of our revenue comes on the volume rate,” said Water Director Rosemary Menard. “When people use less water, we generate less revenue.”

The City’s Water Department does not want people to stop conserving water, but they are facing problems because they say the water storage reservoir at Loch Lummond is not big enough.

“That’s our storage, and it not even one full year of demand,” added Menard. “The storage has been an issue for 40 years.”

Menard also said that the Santa Cruz’s Water Department is looking at a number of solutions to try to fix the storage problem, including storing the water underground.

ORIGINAL STORY: Santa Cruz water use in 2015 was the lowest since 1965, according to the Santa Cruz Water Department.

The total water production in 2015 was 2,475 million gallons. That’s about 100 million gallons less than in 2014.

“To put 2015 water production in perspective, this level of production was comparable to the amount of water produced in the second year of the infamous 1976-1977 drought,” Water Director Rosemary Menard said. “But you would have to go back fifty years to 1965 when ‘normal’ production was that low.”

The city also sold less water in 2015, 180 million gallons less than in 2014 and 777 million gallons less than in 2013.

And while the recent rain is promising, water experts say there’s still a long way to go in terms of the drought. Loch Lomond is at 66% of capacity, and it needs to be full for any consideration of a ‘normal’ supply.

NewsChannel 5’s Paul Dudley will have more on this story tonight.