What water shortage?
Evidently, according to the Los Angeles (County Board of Supervisors) and our City Council, there is no water shortage in the Santa Clarita Valley.
Why? Because they have approved 25,504 new residential units and they are now being built in the SCV.
According to my sources* the average water use per residential unit is 60,225 gallons per year.
If you multiply that number times the 25,504 new units approved by our (local government), we will need to find approximately 154,304,650 additional gallons of water per year, just for these new homes.
The existing residential units in our valley, as of 2021, consist of approximately 72,000-73,000 that use approximately 4,396,425,000 gallons per year. So by the time these new units are completed, we will need enough water to supply 98,504 residential units with 60,225 gallons per unit per year! Or, 4,550,729,650 gallons per year, an increase of 154,304,650 gallons per year. Just in our valley.
If we are to believe the statistics of the sources, and apply those numbers to the new residential units being built, then we can only conclude that our (elected leaders) must feel that there is no water shortage!
But we keep building. There is no water shortage!
But wait, didn’t I just read that we are in the worst drought ever?
What happened to all of those so-called environmental reports? What did they say about water?
* Sources: U.S. Geological Survey, California Department of Water Resources, California Department of Public Health, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and NASA. Population data used to estimate domestic, self-supplied water use came from the difference between the Census population and the public-supply population.
Ron Perry
Canyon Country
