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UAC reviews draft 2025 Urban Water Management Plan; commissioners, public press SFPUC assumptions
Summary
Staff previewed Palo Alto’s draft 2025 Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP), which uses SFPUC-supplied multiple-dry-year supply projections; public commenters and commissioners urged independent scenario work and clearer documentation of SFPUC’s ‘‘design-drought’’ assumptions and requested more peer comparisons before final council action.
Palo Alto staff presented a preview of the draft 2025 Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP), a state-required planning document that must be updated every five years and is needed to maintain state loan and grant eligibility. Staff emphasized that the UWMP follows California Water Code requirements and uses supply and cutback projections supplied by the wholesale supplier (SFPUC), including the SFPUC’s design-drought-based multi‑year cutback tables.
Key updates: staff said the city’s 2025 demand projections — developed through the Bay Area supplier consortium (BASA) process — are lower than the 2020 UWMP forecasts. The draft plan applies SFPUC’s multi‑year cutback scenarios; staff displayed tables showing cutback sequences (example: first‑year cuts in some scenarios of 31% and increases to as much as 48% by the fifth consecutive dry year for severe long‑run scenarios). Staff also said the UWMP will incorporate the state’s new permanent water‑use restrictions (AB 1572) and will note that the city is not proceeding with the previously studied recycled water ‘‘phase 3’’ expansion to the research park.
Public comment and requests: Several public commenters (including Peter Dremmyer and Dave Warner) criticized SFPUC’s design-drought methodology as opaque and urged the city to either (a) commission independent probability-based scenario analyses, or (b) request SFPUC to publish supporting model runs and assumptions. Commenters argued SFPUC’s approach produces very deep rationing numbers without showing the probability or the model steps that produce them.
Staff response and constraints: Staff reminded the commission that the Water Code requires retail agencies to use the wholesale supplier’s reliability projections in UWMPs, but staff said the city can prepare parallel analyses on a different timetable and bring those to SFPUC for discussion. Staff committed to sharing relevant peer-reviewed regional studies and to returning to UAC in May with the complete UWMP packet for recommendation before council in June.
Ending: Commissioners asked staff to provide additional methodological materials (the BASA demand model details, links to peer-reviewed work such as relevant Water Research Foundation studies) and to follow up with SFPUC about assumptions. The UAC did not take formal action but requested further information for the May review before a council adoption schedule.
