In the midst of a historic drought, Californians have no way of knowing who’s guzzling the most water.
That’s not an accident. It’s by design, thanks to an obscure 1997 measure that weakened one of the state’s chief open government laws, the California Public Records Act.
For the source of this legislation, look no further than Silicon Valley, where the city of Palo Alto decided it needed to do more to protect the privacy of the tech elite.
“Palo Alto, even then, was home to a number of very high-profile tech-related residents,” said Ariel Calonne, who was the city attorney at the time. “We had fairly extensive databases that covered a lot of sensitive information for a lot of noteworthy people, and that became a concern for our utility managers.”
In the name of privacy and security, the city of Palo Alto backed legislation sponsored by Byron Sher, the local state senator. It allowed utilities to keep secret their customers’ “utility usage data” – that is, how much water and power they were using.
Other supporters included the California Municipal Utilities Association and the League of California Cities.
At the time, the Public Records Act required agencies that operated utilities to make customers’ bills public upon request. During a 1991 drought, the press exposed California water wasters by relying on data from water utilities. The Los Angeles Times found that the top 100 water users in San Diego gulped down 3,000 gallons or more a day, while the average household used 349 gallons.
Atop the list of the biggest users: The San Diego Union-Tribune’s publisher, Helen Copley, who pumped an average of 10,203 gallons a day on her 9.5-acre La Jolla estate, which was tended by 10 full-time gardeners. Dozens of those top water users complained that publicizing their water use would expose them to security concerns or ridicule, the L.A. Times reported.
In lobbying to change the law, proponents of the Sher measure noted that utility bills include ratepayers’ home addresses. They argued that it was dangerous to make that information public, citing the 1989 shooting of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, who was killed by a stalker who got her address from Department of Motor Vehicles records. The Legislature restricted access after that.
State agencies routinely redact personal information in releasing public records to address security concerns. But proponents of the measure also argued that because private utilities like PG&E did not have to release utility usage data, public ones shouldn’t have to either.
Once it was introduced, there was no stopping the measure, recalled Tom Newton, executive director of the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
The publishers and other open records advocates “made a political assessment that we couldn’t kill it,” said Newton, who was the organization’s general counsel at the time. Instead, he said, they worked to amend the measure to maintain open access to the bills of public officials who set utility rates.
“We did our best” to temper the law’s effects, he said. A spokeswoman for the League of California Cities says it has no position on the law today.
During California’s current drought, the law has been used to shield the water bills of big users like golf courses from public scrutiny.
Last year, the nonprofit First Amendment Coalition sued to get water usage data for major business customers of the Coachella Valley Water District in the Palm Springs area, where golf courses are prodigious water users. Peter Scheer, the coalition’s executive director, argued that the 1997 law was intended to protect the privacy only of people, not corporations.
Earlier this month, a judge ruled that corporate water bills also should remain secret, saying that while businesses don’t have the same privacy rights as people, the law nevertheless applies to all customers.
Under present law, there are a few exceptions that allow for some limited public scrutiny of water bills. Last year, The Center for Investigative Reporting used the public-official exemption to reveal the water use of officials who weren’t living up to their own calls for conservation. Many water agencies redacted the home addresses of the officials but provided copies of their bills.
The law also allows the agencies to disclose customers’ water use if they have violated “utility usage policies.” As water agencies restrict use in response to Gov. Jerry Brown’s recently announced mandatory water cuts, scofflaws could find themselves in the public eye.
But only if the agencies feel like sharing that information.
This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Katharine Mieszkowski can be reached at kmieszkowski@revealnews.org, and Lance Williams can be reached at lwilliams@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @kmieszkowski and @LanceWCIR.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Republish Our Content
Thanks for your interest in republishing a story from Reveal. As a nonprofit newsroom, we want to share our work with as many people as possible. You are free to embed our audio and video content and republish any written story for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license and will indemnify our content as long as you strictly follow these guidelines:
-
Do not change the story. Do not edit our material, except only to reflect changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
-
Please credit us early in the coverage. Our reporter(s) must be bylined. We prefer the following format: By Will Evans, Reveal.
-
If republishing our stories, please also include this language at the end of the story: “This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.”
-
Include all links from the story, and please link to us at https://www.revealnews.org.
PHOTOS
-
You can republish Reveal photos only if you run them in or alongside the stories with which they originally appeared and do not change them.
-
If you want to run a photo apart from that story, please request specific permission to license by contacting Digital Engagement Producer Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org. Reveal often uses photos we purchase from Getty and The Associated Press; those are not available for republication.
DATA
-
If you want to republish Reveal graphics or data, please contact Data Editor Soo Oh, soh@revealnews.org.
IN GENERAL
-
We do not compensate anyone who republishes our work. You also cannot sell our material separately or syndicate it.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, please contact Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If you plan to republish our content, you must notify us republish@revealnews.org or email Sarah Mirk, smirk@revealnews.org.
-
If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you must agree to do so immediately.
-
Please note, we will not provide indemnification if you are located or publishing outside the United States, but you may contact us to obtain a license and indemnification on a case-by-case basis.
If you have any other questions, please contact us at republish@revealnews.org.