The Sierra Club is suing the city of San Francisco’s water department, claiming officials are manipulating water data to justify bigger water grabs for the city – and causing unnecessary harm to the environment, and inflating customer rates.<\/p>\n
The suit<\/a>, filed last week in San Francisco Superior Court, calls for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to revise its state-mandated Urban Water Management Plan to reflect more modest water needs, notably from the Tuolumne River at Yosemite National Park, where the bulk of the city’s water comes from.<\/p>\n The Oakland-based Sierra Club and other environmental groups have long accused San Francisco of holding back too much water at its Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite. They say the excess storage comes at the expense of struggling salmon runs and a drying foothill landscape. The Tuolumne River, because of water draws by the city and others, averages just 21% of its natural flow during peak run-off season.<\/p>\n “They just haven’t cared about their environmental impact for 100 years,” said Mark Shahinian, a member of the executive committee of the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. “We’ve been battling the SFPUC pretty much since they built Hetch Hetchy.”<\/p>\n The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, responding on behalf of the SFPUC, said it had not yet been served the legal complaint. But spokesperson Jen Kwart defended the agency’s water practices.<\/p>\n “The SFPUC works diligently to protect our natural environment while ensuring Bay Area residents have the water they need for years to come,” she said in an email.<\/p>\n The agency has previously maintained that its extensive water diversions<\/p>\n and conservative water plans are necessary for sustaining the Bay Area, its people and its booming economy. In addition to providing water for the city, the SFPUC serves more than two dozen communities in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties.<\/p>\n The Sierra Club’s legal challenge is just one more chapter in California’s enduring water wars, though it comes at a time when San Francisco’s water supplies could be increasingly constrained, not just by climate change and drought, but by a landmark proposal by the state, known as the Bay Delta Plan update, which is seeking to reduce excessive water draws from California rivers.<\/p>\n The Sierra Club lawsuit alleges that the SFPUC’s Urban Water Management Plan, completed last year to help guide water decisions and inform state planning, contains water demand projections that are based on both faulty assumptions and cooked-up data.<\/p>\n For example, such modeling inputs as population growth and future household water consumption are vastly overstated, according to the suit. In addition, the suit accuses the SFPUC of pushing aside demand estimates made by its financial department while, without explanation, advancing alternative projections that suggest much greater water use.<\/p>\n “They tweaked their numbers so they fit their story and not the facts,” Shahinian said. “I think this gives them room to argue that they should get to build more infrastructure and they should be able to hold more water back in storage and take more water from the rivers.”<\/p>\n With higher water demand and more infrastructure, capital costs can go up, prompting water rate increases.<\/p>\n The SFPUC’s Urban Water Management Plan estimates a 17% increase in water demand by San Francisco residents by 2050 and a 14% increase in demand by wholesale customers by mid-century, pushing the total need to 222 gallons per day. The Sierra Club asserts that these projections overestimate water demand by a third.<\/p>\n The lawsuit says that the defects in the SFPUC plan, under the Urban Water Management Plan Act, should render the plan unfit and force the agency to make revisions. The plans are overseen by the California Department of Water Resources.<\/p>\n Subscribe<\/p>\n There’s more to San Francisco with the Chronicle. Subscribe today for just 25\u00a2.<\/a><\/p>\n