Gov. Gavin Newsom asked California to conserve water voluntarily. Guess how that’s going

California’s largest reservoirs may be half-empty or worse, but state officials strove to portray the latest lackluster water conservation data in glass-half-full terms. The results nevertheless continue to show that a year after Gov. Gavin Newsom set a voluntary water conservation target, Californians are broadly volunteering to ignore it.

Urban consumers used about 3% less water in May than they did two years ago, well short of Newsom’s goal of conserving 15% more than in 2020. The Sacramento region did slightly worse than the statewide average in the latest available data, consuming 2.4% less.

The month did constitute a dramatic improvement over the relative binge of the previous two months, when Californians used about 18% more water than they did during the same period in 2020. On that basis and with signs of continued improvement in the preliminary June data, the State Water Resources Control Board judged that “the governor’s message is being heard.”

Since the governor issued his message last July, however, conservation has been modest, with water use down only 2% overall from the baseline. In that period, Californians have hit the governor’s goal only once, in December, and May was the first month this year in which we didn’t use more than before. Noting that many Californians had increased water use in response to unusually hot and dry conditions, the water board said “weather and precipitation have been determining California’s water use instead of a collective drive to conserve.”

After three years of dry conditions and the driest January, February and March on record, Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville, the state’s largest reservoirs, are at 38% and 46% capacity, respectively. Nearly all of California is in at least severe drought, according to the latest report of the U.S. Drought Monitor. And almost 60% of the state, including most of Sacramento County, is in extreme drought, the second-driest level, which the monitor defines as entailing a year-round fire season, endangered fish and other wildlife, and “water use restrictions.”

But Newsom has hesitated to mandate statewide restrictions despite having declared a drought emergency affecting the entire state in October. Instead, echoing his uneven efforts to cajole local governments into taking responsibility for the pandemic, housing and more, he has repeatedly urged local water suppliers to get more serious.

The governor issued an executive order to that effect in March and convened a meeting with water district officials in May to reiterate his request in sterner terms. “Governor Newsom warned that if this localized approach to conservation does not result in a significant reduction in water use statewide this summer,” his office reported, “the state could be forced to enact mandatory restrictions.”

That’s what Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, did when his call for voluntary conservation wasn’t being heeded years into the last drought. In 2015, Brown ordered water agencies to cut consumption by 25%, which they largely did.

That recent history, the severity and duration of the current drought, and the underwhelming results of the governor’s water diplomacy so far indicate it’s time for Newsom to follow Brown’s example and make conservation more than a mere suggestion.