City consultant: conservation-tier pricing linked to lower residential water use

Ben Nielson presented a data-driven review of single-family residential water usage, comparing customers on the city’s conservation billing tier with those on the standard tier. Nielson told the council the analysis focused on residential accounts only, excluded business and institutional accounts, and compared distributions from 2019 through 2025.

Key findings presented included: conservation-tier households exhibit substantially lower median and high-end usage than standard-tier households; peak demand is driven by outdoor seasonal use, especially in August; January usage (indoor proxy) remained steady across years; and a small fraction of households in the upper percentiles (95th–99th) account for a disproportionate share of total consumption. Nielson summarized, “conservation tier households use substantially less water.”

The analysis used 12,000 and 20,000 gallon thresholds as soft benchmarks tied to the two tiers and reported that far fewer conservation-tier accounts exceeded the lower threshold. Nielson also noted a high turnover among the extreme high-use accounts between 2019 and 2025, and that persistent extreme users nonetheless consume large shares of the system demand.

Council members asked whether the analysis controlled for population growth and whether staff could estimate the avoided capital needs (for example, number of wells or tanks saved) under conservation pricing. Nielson said the analysis matched individual households over time where possible and that deeper capacity modeling would be a logical next step; he described this report as preliminary and recommended a follow-up analysis to quantify infrastructure impacts.

Council thanked the presenter and asked staff to consider a supplemental study that would model capacity impacts and the potential savings in wells, storage or treatment costs attributable to reduced demand under conservation pricing.