Davis commission recommends 2025 Urban Water Management Plan for City Council approval

The Climate and Environmental Justice Commission voted unanimously March 23 to recommend the City Council adopt the City of Davis's 2025 Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP), a five-year update that documents municipal water demands, supplies and drought-response planning and will be submitted to the California Department of Water Resources by July 1.

Consultant Melanie Holton, a civil engineer with Brown and Caldwell, told the commission the UWMP is principally a regulatory planning document required under the Urban Water Management Planning Act of 1983. "The act requires that any purveyor water agency serving more than 3,000 customers or 3,000 acre-feet per year is required to submit an urban water management plan and they are due every five years," Holton said, summarizing the legal timetable and the plan's required elements.

The nut graf: The 2025 UWMP compiles historical water use, projects demand through 2050, summarizes available supplies and includes a drought-risk assessment and a water-shortage contingency plan the commission must adopt separately at a public hearing. Staff and the consultant told commissioners they found no scenario in the analysis that would create an unavoidable, multi-year shortage under the plan assumptions; the document does, however, include quantified climate-change adjustments and service-level standards the city will monitor annually.

Key facts and numbers: the plan reports a 2025 overall water use of roughly 146 gallons per capita per day (GPCD) and projects a decline to about 125 GPCD by 2050 if urban water-use objectives and assumed conservation savings are met. The presentation said Davis's measured real water loss was about 21.9 gallons per day per connection in 2025, below the state's 31.1 GPCD real-loss standard for 2028. The consultant said the plan accounts for an assumed average reduction of roughly 900 acre-feet per year in surface-water supply to reflect mid-century climate impacts; that reduction is included in the supply stacks used in the reliability analysis.

Commissioners probed a range of operational and planning issues before the vote. Don Calciano, the city's water conservation coordinator, described the city's 10-year capital improvement program to replace aging pipes and its use of acoustic leak detectors and meter replacement to reduce distribution and customer-side loss. Commissioners also asked whether the UWMP included formal sensitivity analyses for more severe climate-change scenarios; the presenters said the UWMP used readily available, plausible assumptions but did not perform a multi-scenario sensitivity analysis as part of the contracted scope.

Public comment on the item was largely supportive but urged additional breakdowns (for example, gallons per tree or per acreage, and clearer population-projection assumptions) and recommended converting key assumptions or follow-up analyses into formal commission requests or resolutions so they remain on record.

The commission's motion recommended the council's public hearing and adoption of the UWMP; the commission vote carried unanimously. Staff noted the city council public hearing on the UWMP is scheduled for May 19; once council action is taken and the document is finalized, the city will submit the UWMP to the Department of Water Resources and continue annual supply-and-demand assessments.

The plan remains a planning-level document: commissioners and staff said the city will continue year-over-year assessment (annual water supply and demand assessments and annual water-loss audits) and that some topics raised in public comment ' such as more detailed analysis of irrigation versus tree and park usage, and expanded climate sensitivity work ' could be considered as separate follow-ups or future scope additions.