Sacramento refuses to disclose its top water users

Hopefully you have read Joe Rubin’s investigation into the city of Sacramento’s massively expensive water-meter-installation plan, which appeared in SN&R last month (see “Flushing money,” SN&R Feature Story, November 13, 2014). The local government watchdog group Eye on Sacramento is following up on Rubin’s report with a complaint to the Sacramento County grand jury.

EOS has in the past called the Sacramento Department of Utilities the city’s “reliable scandal generator” because of its history of missing water meters and misuse of public funds. Ouch. Suffice it to say, the DOU has a big public-trust deficit to pay down.

It doesn’t help that, for as long as Bites can remember, the agency has always been less than forthcoming. Unfortunately, that’s still true. You see it in the way the city has handled questions about its water-meter program, and in other ways, too.

For example: A few weeks back, the DOU refused to give reporters at Capitol Public Radio the city’s list of its 20 biggest water users. It’s not a difficult list to produce; the city has done it plenty of times in the past, for stories published in The Sacramento Bee and SN&R. Cap Radio had requested the information as part of a story they did on the Nestlé water plant, and critics who say the city ought to charge more to bottlers who resell city water at a big markup.

Whatever you think about the bottled-water industry or Nestlé, it’s a legitimate story on a real policy issue. It’s impossible to talk about the impact of water bottlers on the city’s water supply without this kind of basic information.

But the DOU has decided that the information is now off-limits to the public. When Bites made the same request, it was swiftly rejected, without any explanation beyond “privacy concerns.”

Whose privacy? California’s Public Records Act says: “Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to require the disclosure of the name, credit history, utility usage data, home address, or telephone number of utility customers of local agencies.”

But the law is clearly intended to protect the privacy of residences, not big industrial water users. And that’s exactly the way the city read the law until a few weeks ago. It has always—with some prodding—kept residential water use private, but disclosed data for government and industrial users.

This time, the city wouldn’t even disclose water-use data for government agencies that are among its top-20 water users. That’s how much thought the DOU put into complying with Bites’ public-records request.

Nothing in the Public Records Act says the city must to keep anyone’s water-meter-records secret. And, in fact, the PRA says the government “shall” provide the records when “the public interest in disclosure of the information clearly outweighs the public interest in nondisclosure.”

After a few weeks of emailing and a phone conversation with DOU Interim Director Bill Busath and Senior Deputy City Attorney Joe Robinson, Bites received an emailed response saying: “We do not see that the public benefit of releasing this data clearly outweighs the public benefit of not doing so.”

Clearly they aren’t looking very hard. Because they are getting the Public Records Act completely backward. And because in fact the city’s interpretation, until now, has always been that the public has a right to know about commercial water use. What changed?

For one thing, there’s increasing public interest in the sweet deal that for-profit bottlers are getting on city water. And Busath said that, after a 2011 SN&R story looking at the city’s top water users, there was “significant pushback from some of the entities.” Which entities? Busath couldn’t or wouldn’t say. “We just disagree with your interpretation of the law,” he added.

But why? Busath and Robinson each have taxpayer-funded annual salaries well above $100,000. Why not interpret the law on the side of the public, which pays them so handsomely, instead of on the side of the bottlers, who want to keep their water use secret from the public?

(Ironically, the city actually lists the top 10 water users—some government, some commercial—in a recent bond report. Incredibly, DOU says the privacy concerns only start when you get to No. 11 on the top-water-users list.)

Of course, the city’s too-expensive, too-slow water-meter-installation project has made it impossible to even begin a discussion of tiered water rates—charging big water users higher prices—which is common in other cities.

Instead, the city relies on an outdated system of water rationing. To enforce this, DOU asks residents to keep an eye on their neighbors’ water use and report them to the city for watering their flowers on the wrong day. But Nestlé and other bottlers have a privacy right that shields their water use from public view.

You’re just going to have to trust DOU that that’s fair.