Gov. Newsom’s drought response is falling short. Here’s how he should respond to the crisis

The preliminary results of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s voluntary water conservation goal are in, and residents have largely volunteered to ignore him.

It’s another sign that Newsom must do more than politely ask Californians to get serious about conserving an all-too-finite resource.

Sacramento area residents used 6% less water last month compared with August 2020, according to data recently released by the Sacramento Regional Water Authority. That’s less than half the savings Newsom called for in an executive order he signed in July. The governor’s order urged residents across the state to save water through measures such as keeping their sprinklers off, making sure their dishwashers are full and “taking shorter showers.”

Statewide conservation data for July, the latest available, was worse. Sacramento isn’t the only region struggling to save anything like the 15% the governor called for during his July photo-op along the dramatically expanded shores of Lopez Lake in San Luis Obispo County. That’s when he also announced the expansion of a declared drought emergency to 50 of the state’s 58 counties.

Granted, the Sacramento area’s water usage is at least headed in the right direction — downward — in a year that saw consumption grow until recently, local water officials noted. But the fact that the region has just begun to save water also shows how far California is from grappling with the true extent of the crisis.

Finding a dry lake bed to stand on long ago ceased to be a challenge for Newsom or anyone else. Record lows at Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir, forced an unprecedented shutdown of the hydroelectric plant it powers last month. Mass fish kills and massive wildfires further underscore the dire conditions.

The latest report of the U.S. Drought Monitor finds nearly half of California, including Sacramento County and most of the Central Valley, in “exceptional” drought conditions, the most severe category. Nearly 90% of the state is in at least “extreme” conditions, the second-driest, defined as water levels that are “inadequate for agriculture, wildlife, and urban needs.”

All of California, according to the federal report, is at some level of drought.

Yes, as the monitor’s map shows, some parts of the state are drier than others. Parched North Coast towns in the Russian River watershed, the subject of the first of Newsom’s trilogy of incremental drought declarations, are already resorting to such extreme and dismaying measures as having water trucked in from far-flung locations.

But California as we know it is made possible by a monumental network of state and federal water infrastructure, so we and our leaders should stop pretending we’re not all in this together. This is one more area in which the Newsom administration’s habit of carefully deferring to localities and individuals serves as a means of dodging the state government’s crucial role and responsibility.

When Newsom called for voluntary conservation last month, he said he might go further by the end of September, at the end of the hydrological year, and, perhaps more importantly, after his brush with political extinction in the form of a recall attempt. With the state’s troubled political waters calmed for the moment and its actual waters showing few signs of doing anything but receding, it’s time for the governor to impose mandatory statewide water restrictions and ensure that all Californians are doing their part to respond to the emergency.