Water agencies across the state won’t tell us who’s guzzling the most water, even when some people are using millions of gallons a year in the middle of the historic drought.
The Sacramento Bee says it’s time for that to stop. In an editorial titled “California’s water hogs need a little sunshine,” the newspaper last week called on legislators to end an exemption in the state’s public records law that allows water agencies to shield the names of its biggest residential users.
The editorial came in response to a Reveal investigation showing that at least 365 households in the state used at least 1 million gallons of water in a year. The largest known water guzzler used 11.8 million gallons – enough for 90 families.
As previous Reveal reporting showed, Palo Alto city officials advocated for creating the exemption in 1997 in order to protect the privacy of tech executives. The Bee says the law raises basic questions of fairness:
Privacy is an important right. But there should be no exemption to the Public Records Act because a person might be embarrassed. If attention shames extreme water wasters in curtailing use, the public would benefit. The alternative is that the rest of us get the message that we aren’t in this together, after all.
The city of Sacramento not only refused to release the names of its biggest water users, but it also wouldn’t provide our reporters with basic data unless we paid $557 for programming.
The Bee penned another editorial this week demanding that the city release the data and the names:
State law allows local agencies to disclose water wasters’ names if it’s in the public interest; Sacramento should get with the program. Surely our interest in ensuring that the burden of this statewide emergency isn’t borne just by the lower and middle classes is obvious by now.
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.