League of Women Voters of California Education Fund
Alameda County, CA November 4, 2008 Election
	Susi Ostlund Answers Questions Candidate for Board Member; East Bay Municipal Utility District; Ward 5

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of the Bay Area and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. Is there a fairer way to reduce water usage than the current 19% reduction for all homeowners?

If there is a better method, I'd like to hear it. Some of the options explored so far and discarded have been: Number of family members in household, size of land parcels, doing surveys of "ideal" homes for the different microclimates and using that as a goal for each micro-region.... These all have had worse problems than using past billing data.

Of all the allocation methods proposed, basing it on your past billing data (which we actually have legal access to) is a compromise, and the allocation adjustment process does allow for exceptions for people who do believe it unfair. If you don't like your allocation amount someone can make contact with you to make a more customized allocation allotment for your household --at great expense to EBMUD, unfortunately. There are estimates that we'll see over 70,000 allocation adjustment requests filed before June. That's going to cost a lot of money, assuming our staff can even keep up with that kind of work load.

The fact is we do need to conserve water, and yes, it will be an inconvenience for everyone until the drought is over no matter what allocation system we use. Overall households are doing a great job of meeting this goal. From what I'm hearing, only 20% of all households are facing any kind of extra charge, and the average overage for a 60 day billing period is $10 +or $5 a month.

I've talked with people inside EBMUD, outside EBMUD, and all around my district. Basing drought allocations on past water consumption is the fairest method we've got so far. I'm not happy with it and I'd love to have a better process. But it's what we have legal access to without becoming Big Brother peering into people's homes and being very invasive of their privacy.

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Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' responses are not edited or corrected by the League.

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 22, 2008 13:46
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