Naming high water users in the drought: It depends where you live

Oakland Athletics executive Billy Beane and a retired Chevron Oil executive are among the top excessive water users in a district east of San Francisco, utility records show.

Beane… had the third-highest household total at 5,996 gallons per day, according to public records released Thursday by the East Bay Municipal Utility District. He blamed a leak he didn’t know about until his shocking bill arrived.

He told the San Jose Mercury News that he had a leaky water line that needed to be fixed.

“Three irrigation leaks were recently discovered and corrected”.

Alamo resident Mark Pine was second on the list at 8,091 gallons of water per day. Still, it is an indication of the huge disparity in water use among the 1.3 million customers in 35 East Bay cities that receive water from the district.

Water suppliers take different approaches on what they reveal about guzzlers even though California’s more than 400 water districts are under state orders to reduce use.

EBMUD board members said they adopted the excess water-use penalties to give high users a message to conserve, although a few critics have argued wealthy customers will not be deterred by the penalties. That apparently hasn’t curbed Beane’s water use too much. But a 1997 state law declared customer information private except under certain exceptions – including cases where customers are penalized for violating a distinct policy, water officials say. Billing is spread out over a two-month period.

The list of 1,108 names is not complete, according to Abby Figueroa, district spokeswoman, including only about a third of the district’s residential custormers.

In most years, over 90 percent of EBMUD’s water originates in the Sierra Nevada, then flows down the Mokelumne River into the Pardee and Camanche Reservoirs northeast of Lodi.