Timeline for Can California water districts legally use proprietary water budget formulas?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
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| Mar 22, 2021 at 20:02 | comment | added | ohwilleke | @personal_cloud A water district's costs are what it says its costs are. If it is spending the money on third-parties rather than compensation for directors or a controlling municipality it decides what it needs to do. If you don't like it, you find a way to get a different board in office, directly if it is elected, or indirectly, if it isn't. The case of some constituents thinking that a special district board is spending too much money is a generic one. | |
| Mar 21, 2021 at 3:56 | comment | added | personal_cloud | @ohwilleke Yes, cost is a political question, but doesn't prop 218 also say something about that? I mean, the water district is supposed to be covering their own costs. They're not supposed to be imposing additional costs on customers by forcing them to buy access to more expensive data, or even by installing plants in certain "conditions" (whatever Hydropoint means by that) which are going to be more expensive than perfectly reasonable low-water plants that the landscape contractor would have otherwise selected? And they're certainly not supposed to be channeling irrigation controller sales. | |
| Mar 19, 2021 at 21:56 | comment | added | ohwilleke | @personal_cloud The Board has a strong presumption that it is acting in good faith and their judgment will be respected absent a showing otherwise (and sometimes even with a showing otherwise). Reasonable in this sense means it is at least a rough justice approximation of the thing it is trying to measure. Cost is irrelevant to a court and strictly for the Board to decide as a political question. | |
| Mar 19, 2021 at 21:34 | comment | added | Dale M♦ | “When computing power was expensive” and consisted of people with pencils and log-tables | |
| Mar 19, 2021 at 19:10 | comment | added | personal_cloud | That makes sense. So then what I'm wondering is, how can the proprietary formula be "reasonable". It is basically saying that you're supposed to regulate your water use based on data that can't be independently verified, and is hard to obtain. For example, a consumer-grade smart irrigation controller is going to take NWS and/or CIMIS data, not the Hydro Point data. No pure-play controller company is going to base their business on a relationship with a company like Hydro Point, so Hydro Point can charge whatever they want. Is it reasonable to assume consumers will pay for that data? | |
| Mar 19, 2021 at 18:32 | history | answered | ohwilleke | CC BY-SA 4.0 |