Public Water Systems in California: Consumption,
Conveyance Infrastructure, and Drivers of
Privatization in Los Angeles County
By Herbie Huff, for UP206A, Fall 2010
Introduction
Potable water comes to the tap through a complex process that begins with surface and groundwater
sources, continues with elaborate infrastructure to convey, store, and treat the water, and ends with
delivery pipes and user fees. Every part of this process involves federal, state, and local governments,
environmental watchdogs, and organized private interests. The water supply process necessitates
relationships among these various parties. This paper concerns the geography of those relationships,
especially as it is a product of underlying geographical distributions of people, precipitation, agricultural
production, and political power. The first half takes a broad look at where precipitation falls in the state
of California, and where water is used in the state. The second half zooms in on water supply utilities in
Los Angeles County, and compares the geographies of publicly owned utilities to those of private, or
investor-owned utilities.
Research Methods
This mapping work builds on a broader sectoral analysis of the water industry being conducted by
myself and three other students in UP237. That sectoral analysis includes interviews, plant tours
government data from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), government data
based on the Standard Occupation Codes (SOC), and a study of unionization levels, competition, and
pertinent government regulations. It considers not only water supply but also wastewater disposal and
treatment. For this spatial analysis, I focus on water consumption and on the entities at the last stage of
the water supply chain before consumption, the local water suppliers. I draw on information from our
interviews with the head of Santa Monica’s Water Division and with staff from Golden State Water
Company, as well as from an understanding of the importance of Metropolitan Water District and water
import infrastructure that comes from the academic literature. To create maps that augment our
understanding of the sector, I use demographic and geographic data generated and compiled by local,
state, and federal governments.
Water Consumption in California
The United States Geological Service (USGS) compiles data on fresh water withdrawals and surface
water withdrawals in each state.1 In some states, the data is further available by county; this is the case
in California. Map 1 portrays the USGS county-level data. I used the join tool in ArcGIS to match each
county’s consumption to its spatial file from the Census 2000 Tiger / Line Data.2 I then displayed the
counties in five quintiles of consumption level. Map 1 illustrates that the top quintile of water
consumers in California is mostly located in the southern parts of the state and includes a few counties
in the central portion of the state. Map 2 normalizes this data by population, and again displays it by
quintile, with a different color gradient for clarity. The USGS data includes a population field which
facilitates this normalization: I simply used quantity-based feature symbology in ArcGIS. Map 2
demonstrates that agriculture in the center of the state consumes heavily. Los Angeles County, which
fell into the top quintile by consumption, is in the middle quintile for population-normalized
consumption.
1
The USGS data can be downloaded here, accessed October 2010:
http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/data/2000/index.html. Documentation on how the estimates are calculated and
compiled is here: http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/htdocs/text-intro.html#sources
2
Available for download here, accessed October 2010.
http://arcdata.esri.com/data/tiger2000/tiger_download.cfm
Map 1: Water Usage in California Counties, 2000. Prepared by Herbie Huff. Data from the US
Geological Survey on Public Water Withdrawals in Million gallons / day.
Map 2: Water Usage per Capita. Prepared by Herbie Huff. Source: USGS.
The Geography of Precipitation and Water Conveyance
Equipped with an understanding of how water demand is distributed spatially throughout the state, we
turn to the geographies of water supply. Map 3 depicts five ranges of annual average precipitation in the
state, and displays continuous areas that fall under the same range. The polygons represent areas
defined by what are called isohyetal lines, i.e. lines of equal precipitation. The California Department of
Fire and Forestry compiles this data and publishes it as GIS-ready data in the geodatabase format.3 For
simplicity, Map 3 categorizes precipitation into five quintiles, which creates large and relatively simple
polygons. Map 3 demonstrates that the most water-rich portions of the State are in the north, and that
there are large swaths of desert in the center and south receiving less than 13 inches a year of rain or
snow. I had to export the geodatabase as a layer in ArcMap to be able to do the category and symbology
manipulations.
Because most of the state’s precipitation is in the northern counties but there are major population
centers like Los Angeles and San Diego in the southern counties, the state has built an impressive
network of water conveyance infrastructure. Map 4 displays these aqueducts and dams. The spatial files
for these infrastructure from the US Geological Survey’s “U.S. National Atlas Water Feature Areas”
database.4 The data set includes aqueducts, canals, dams, intercoastal waterways, rivers, and streams,
but I am only interested in the large conveyance infrastructure, which is only the aqueducts and dams. I
clipped the national data set to California, then made an attribute sub-set selection to exclude the other
data elements that I did not want to display. Because the dams are numerous and their labels create
clutter, I wrote a query for conditional labeling so that only aqueducts would be labeled. I then used
Adobe Illustrator to move the labels. Map 4 shows many large aqueducts converging on the water-poor
but population-rich county of Los Angeles.
Note the presence of the MWD Feeder aqueducts in Map 4. MWD stands for the Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California, which controls nearly all of the water that is imported to Southern
California. MWD is a quasi-governmental body created in 1928 to collect and represent the water needs
of smaller governmental bodies such as municipal water districts and San Diego County. It is known as a
“water wholesaler” because it sells water to municipal utilities, known as “water retailers,” who then
sell the water to customers.
3
Available at http://frap.fire.ca.gov/data/frapgisdata/download.asp?rec=rain, accessed October 2010.
Available at http://coastalmap.marine.usgs.gov/GISdata/basemaps/usa/water/hydrogl020.htm, accessed
October 2010.
4
Map 3: Isohyetal Polygons for Average Annual Precipitation. Prepared by Herbie Huff. Source:
California Department of Fire and Forestry
Map 4: Water Conveyance Infrastructure in California, Aqueducts and Dams. Prepared by Herbie Huff.
Source: USGS.
Local Utilities, Local Surface Water, and the Geography of Privatization
The state has invested an enormous amount of money to build aqueducts and dams, but local water
retailers conduct the business of actually delivering the water to customers, billing them for it, and
maintaining local water mains. Consider, for example, the budget of Santa Monica’s Water Division,
shown below in two tables. One table lists capital expenditures and another lists operating
expenditures, because this is how the Division classifies its financials. Expenses associated with water
infrastructure are in red.
Table 1: SANTA MONICA Water Division Capital Improvement Program Allocations
Fiscal Year
CIP Allocations to Water Fund
2005-2006 Actual
$2.5 Million
2006-2007 Actual
$4.5 Million
2008-2009 Actual
$8.4 Million
2009-2010 Budgeted
$2.5 Million
Table 2: SMWD Operating Budget, FY2008-2009
Operating Expense
FY2008-2009 Budgeted
Personnel
$5,410,336
Administrative indirect
$1,121,766
Contractual Services
$512,900
Repairs and Maintenance
$210,800
Materials and Supplies
$3,992,126
Utilities
$462,494
Water Purchase
$4,541,875
Casualty, Property, and Liability
Costs
$133,700
Other
$512,852
TOTAL
$16,898,849
As the tables show, Santa Monica spends about $4.5 Million of its operating budget on materials and
supplies and contractual services, both expenses that are associated with water main fixes.5 Out of the
capital budget, which goes almost entirely to water main fixes (other minor capital expenses include
new computers, and new service vehicles), anywhere between $2.5 Million and $8.4 Million was spent.
Capital infrastructure thus dominates the utilities budget, eclipsing the next largest line items, personnel
($5.4 Million) and water purchases from MWD ($4.5 Million). Santa Monica’s budget illustrates that
although purchasing imported water that has traveled through the state’s conveyance infrastructure is
costly, repairing local water mains can be even more costly. Thus, in this section I shift my focus onto
these local utilities and their local infrastructure. In an interview with staff at Golden State Water
Company, LA county’s largest private water retailer, I learned that underinvestment in local
infrastructure is a main driver of privatization. According to Dennis Mori, Senior Financial Analyst at
GSWC, the company often acquires new territory when a local municipality runs its water utility into the
ground by failing to invest in capital infrastructure. Politicians do not upgrade water mains on a regular
basis in an attempt to keep water rates as low as possible, but then the utility reaches a critical point
where so many mains are breaking that the city is forced to address the issue. Often, politicians will then
put the utility out for bid, because they are in a position where they would have to raise rates
significantly to perform the necessary capital improvements, and adjoining cities or GSWC can offer
lower rates because of their economies of scale.
Map 5 starts with the basics of local water delivery: the locations of some utility headquarters. These
are listed on the California Employment Development Department’s website.6 One major drawback of
this data source is that it excludes many public water departments that are located inside of larger
bureaus without “water” in their title. This is the case for Santa Monica’s Water Division, which is not
included in the database because it is inside of the Public Works department. I sorted the list by number
of employees and only mapped utilities that have more than twenty employees. The address
information for each utility is very incomplete, usually just a street and a city. I supplemented the CAEDD’s database with an extra field, the zip code, which I determined by searching for the utility on
Google Maps. I then used an address locator with zip codes as the zone to geocode the utility
headquarters. I converted the labels to annotation in order to delete most of them and highlight some
examples. I put a halo around the labels to make them stand out more clearly. The Census “place” is the
unit of analysis for this map and the remaining maps; these are cities and areas of unincorporated
county land. I clipped the Census place file for California to LA County, and joined demographic data
from the 2000 Census that I downloaded using American Fact Finder. The place boundaries best indicate
the boundaries of local governance, which is the appropriate unit of analysis for water delivery systems.
Unfortunately, these locations are not particularly illuminating because they are usually office buildings
not necessarily near operations outposts. Golden State Water Company’s headquarters, for example,
are in San Dimas, but they have operations offices and treatment plants throughout the county. It would
5
Interview with Gil Borboa, Director of the Water Division in Santa Monica, November 2010.
Available at
http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/aspdotnet/databrowsing/IndSectorAndKeyword.aspx?menuChoice=emp
&searchType=Industry. I searched for employers in NAICS code 221310, which is defined as water supply utilities.
6
be informative to map the locations of the latter kinds of offices because they would likely be more
colocated with intrinsic geographies like elevation and proximity to water sources, but a database of all
utility establishment locations does not exist.
Map 5: Example Water Utilities in Los Angeles County with over 20 employees. Prepared by Herbie
Huff. Source: California Employment Development Division.
The Geography of Privatization: Golden State Water Company
I would have liked to map service areas of example utilities, but these boundary files are not publicly
available. They are bundled in a database with point files containing the locations of water treatment
and storage facilities, and the California Department of Public Health, which controls these data,
considers it a homeland security issue to make those public.7
In search of a proxy for these boundaries, Map 6 color codes cities that are partially or fully served by
Golden State Water Company. In some cases, like Claremont, Golden State Water Company serves the
entire city. In other cases, it only serves a small portion of a city, usually annexed to a larger adjoining
GSWC service area. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine the exact service boundary and GSWC
would not share their boundary maps or files. Nonetheless, this proxy map does give some indication of
where GSWC does business.
To create the data for Map 6, I used this list of communities served on GSWC’s website. I used an Excel
file download from American Fact Finder that had all the Census Places in LA County, and I marked those
served by GSWC with a ‘1’ in a new column, “Is_GSWC_Here”. When I joined demographic data to the
Census Places layer, this GSWC marker was also joined. I exported the resulting data set as a new layer,
saved it, and added metadata in ArcCatalog. See Appendix B for a screenshot of the metatdata.
In order to speculate about any locational factors that might be correlated with a city privatizing its
water service to GSWC, I map many water-related layers on Map 6: aqueducts, dams, water bodies,
rivers, and water utility headquarters with over 20 employees. Map 6 disproves many hypotheses one
might conjure about the GSWC service area. For example, one might hypothesize that:



GSWC serves areas that lack another strong water utility, or
GSWC service areas are near large dams and water bodies, allowing GSWC to serve them
cheaply, or
GSWC service areas are clustered around GSWC’s headquarters in San Dimas.
Map 6 demonstrates that none of these are true.
Map 7 explores one possibility provoked by Map 6: that GSWC-served cities are located near the rivers
that flow out of the only portion of LA County that receives high levels of precipitation, the San Gabriel
mountains. These rivers are the most water-rich in the County. I created a one-mile buffer around these
rivers, using manual selection (and the precipitation layer as my guide) to target them. I made both the
buffer and the precipitation layer transparent in order to preserve the visibility of the rivers and GSWCserved cities. Indeed, with the exception of some places in the South Bay and South LA, most GSWCserved cities are crossed by these rivers and the one-mile buffer.
7
Phone conversation with Jeff O’Keefe of the District 15 Office of the Drinking Water Program of the California
Department of Public Health, December 2010.
Map 6: GSWC-Served Places with Water Utility Headquarters, Dams, Aqueducts, Rivers, and Streams.
Prepared by Herbie Huff. Source: Original Data (for GSWC areas), USGS data for aqueducts and dams,
ESRI Tiger/Line data for Rivers, Streams, and Water Bodies
Map 7: GSWC-Served Places with rivers that have their source in the San Gabriel mountains. Annual
Average Precipitation data from the California Department of Fire and Forestry, original GSWC data,
and ESRI/Tiger Rivers and Streams data.
Comparison: Race Inside and Outside GSWC-Served Cities
Now that I have my GIS layer approximating GSWC’s service area, I can ask some questions about the
demographics of that service area. Jeff O’Keefe of the California Department of Public Health’s Drinking
Water Programs suggested that GSWC tended to serve poorer areas of the county that have higher
percentages of people of color. In my interview with GSWC staff, they mentioned several low-income
communities that were inside the GSWC service area, including Inglewood, Gardena, Carson, and
Downey.
I hypothesize that GSWC-Served cities have a higher percentage of people of color than non-GSWCserved cities, and use ArcMap to test this hypothesis. First, I define a new field in the Census Place
demographic data, the number of people who identified as neither white nor Asian. I choose this
definition for people of color because it includes black, Latina/o, native, and mixed race people. I did not
include Asian people in the analysis because many Asian people possess educational levels and incomes
on par with whites. Based on the communities that GSWC staff named, I suspected that excluding Asians
would result in a more stark comparison.
A model in ArcMap automates the spatial calculations and comparisons. First, the model creates two
new shapefiles, one of GSWC-served places and one of non-GSWC-served places. Then, it calculates
summary statistics: the mean percentage non-white and non-Asian among the places, and the standard
deviation. Finally, it outputs these summary statistics as a .dbf table. Table 3 displays the results of the
model.
Table 3: Summary Statistics for Race Inside and Outside GSWC-Served Places
Neither White
nor Asian
Mean in GSWC Standard
Deviation in
GSWC
Mean outside of
GSWC
Standard Deviation
outside of GSWC
35%
28%
23%
20%
Unfortunately, the results of the model are inconclusive. Although the mean percentage of people of
color in GSWC-served cities is higher, the standard deviations are so high in both groups that the
difference between the two groups may be attributable to natural variance. Perhaps a populationweighted analysis would show more conclusive results. The ideal analysis would use the real servicearea boundaries instead of the imperfect proxy used here.
Map 8: Race inside and outside of GSWC-served places. Prepared by Herbie Huff. Source: US Census
2000 Summary File, Original Data for GSWC-served places.
Conclusion and Recommendations
In some ways, distance is irrelevant to water issues once the necessary conveyance infrastructure has
been built. GIS maps are more useful in explaining a backstory than in determining policy. More
importantly, though, when it comes to spatial information for water, there are more data lacking than
extant data. Most of the spatial data seems to have been compiled with an environmental analysis in
mind, rather than a planning or economic analysis. Obviously, both of these kinds of analyses are
important to the health of our water supply systems. The government agencies that oversee water
should address this bias. There is no publicly available spatial data on water utility service boundaries,
number of people served by public vs. private utilities, local water consumption, water rates, or water
quality violations. Likewise, there is no publicly available spatial data on the networks of water mains or
their condition, on employees and wages in the water sector, or on groundwater depths and local well
withdrawals. Economic development strategies targeting water utilities are limited by a lack of
information on where water operators work because only the headquarters are listed in the State’s
Employment Development database. Still, the spatial analysis here prompts some recommendations.
Target agriculture in conservation efforts. As Maps 1 and 2 demonstrate, counties in the Central Valley
where there are many farm consume the most water, both in absolute consumption and in populationnormalized terms. Many conservation efforts, though, target only residential consumption.
Make water service boundaries public information. Water rates, water quality, and water consumption
are all local issues with water service boundaries as the geographical unit of analysis. It is impossible to
examine the geographical aspects of these issues in detail without knowing where the boundaries are
that define service areas.
At least in Southern California, be wary of water abundance. While a shortage of water supplies is
much talked about in desert cities like Phoenix, the story much less often told is the one about failing
water mains and lack of investment in capital infrastructure. If what Map 7 suggests is correct, that
water-rich cities in Los Angeles County have not invested adequately in capital infrastructure, either
because they are older or because water has not been high on their list of political priorities, then other
water-rich cities should take heed. They should evaluate the quality of their infrastructure and commit
to a long-term plan for updating it if they want to remain public.
Better understand who is being served by private water retailers. Although the racial comparison in
Map 8 was inconclusive, it was based on an inadequate definition of GSWC’s service area and a very
rough index for the percentage of people of color. A further analysis is possible, but it may require
manual data collection for each water utility in LA County. Although it is difficult, this research should be
conducted, because (1) government officials suspect a racial disparity in water privatization and (2) the
consequence of privatization is a fundamental change in how water is managed, one in which public
governance structures are undone and public participation is marginalized. Sustainability mandates and
comprehensive planning that links water to other local issues, such as environmental protection and
development, are much more difficult to achieve when the water system has been privatized.
Appendix A: Summary Statistics Model in ArcMap
Appendix B: Metadata