The Orange County Water District, which provides water for over 2.5 million people in the region, will not mandate outdoor water usage to one day a week, officials said April 27, a day after the neighboring Metropolitan Water District—which services parts of Los Angeles, Riverside, and Ventura counties—announced an emergency conservation mandate to do so.
According to Steve Sheldon, president of the OC Water District, the agency will not need to take such a conservation tact, because it has a groundwater replenishment system and has spent billions of dollars to be self-reliant.
“Mandatory conservation,” he said, “would reduce wastewater flows … which would partially strand the investment [we have] made,” Sheldon said.
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