October 2022
Below is a summary of DWR’s recent Long Term Framework recommendations to the State Water Board as submitted on Thursday, September 29, 2022.
Note that these recommendations are subject to change per the final rulemaking process that allows for additional evaluation and public comment. The State Water Board is expected to initiate final rulemaking in early 2023, as announced at CalWEP’s fall Plenary on September 8, 2022.
Residential Outdoor Standard:
Established a reference evapotranspiration factor (ETF) of 0.80 and will decrease to an ETF of 0.63 by 2030 with no further recommendations to reduce.
For new residential construction, the standard is established at 0.55 with potential to decrease based on future MWELO amendments.
For Special Landscape Areas (SLA), like food gardens and recreational turf, the standard ETF is set at 0.80 and will decrease to an ETF of 0.63 with no further recommendation to reduce. Alternatively, suppliers can choose to include SLAs under the CII-DIM standard which is set to an ETF of 1.0.
October 2021
Landscape Objective Equation
At the October 25, 2021 stakeholder meeting, DWR released revised recommendations for the outdoor standard ETAF. See slide below for summary.
Landscape Area Measurement
DWR reported that provisional landscape area measurement data was delivered to retail suppliers earlier this year. DWR received feedback from 56% of retail suppliers. Currently, landscape area for 395 of the 398 retail water suppliers have been finalized and will be delivered "over the next couple of weeks."
August 2021
Landscape Area Measurement
All suppliers should have received their landscape imagery data by now. DWR requested feedback/changes on individual supplier’s landscape measurement data by June 30th. DWR has until August 30th to provide landscape measurement files back to those agencies that requested changes.
Landscape Objective Equation
DWR has also released a proposed landscape budget equation that will be used to determine a supplier’s residential outdoor budget and is seeking input. There has been much conversation about whether to use irrigated or irrigable landscape measurements to apply to the budget equation.
On June 30, at the Standards, Methodologies and Performance Measures Workgroup meeting, DWR proposed:
Timeline