Affordable Water For All in California

The Human Right to Water calls for water to be clean, accessible, and affordable.

We’ve spent decades increasing access to funding to provide solutions for safe drinking water.  But lack of affordability is the biggest and more intractable barrier.

Affordability is a trendy term in politics these days, but Clean Water Action has been actively working for over a decade on multiple fronts to address water affordability.

• In 2015, we worked with Assembly member Bill Dodd to pass AB 401, a bill that required the State Water Board to develop a statewide water affordability program.  The Board provided that report to the Legislature in February 2020, just a few weeks before the COVID-19 shutdown.
• In 2019, we worked with then-Senator Dodd on SB-19, a bill to provide more transparency and public information about water shutoffs.  The bill required public water systems to post their shutoff policies on their website, limited how much they could charge for restoring water service, and provided repayment plans to low-income or medically-vulnerable ratepayers.
• During COVID, we worked with the administration on an executive order to ban water shutoffs, a ban that was lifted in January 2023.  To address the increasing debt held by customers and water systems, Clean Water and our allies lobbied for COVID emergency funding to address unpaid water bills and were able to get $1 billion appropriated.

While water bills have been rising faster than inflation for at least two decades, the pandemic created fundamental changes that have exacerbated the affordability problems of public water systems:

• Many public water systems expanded their affordability programs and tried to avoid water shutoffs after the governor’s executive order expired.
• Public water systems are carrying far more customer debt than they did before COVID. That’s a problem, because it means more customers are falling behind on their bills.

To address these spiraling issues, Clean Water Action and our allies have been working for the past 5 years to establish a statewide low-income rate assistance program (LIRA), as described in AB 401.  We’ve introduced three different bills, all of which failed because we couldn’t identify a source of funding for the estimated $450 million annual cost of the program. 

Although our coalition has yet to succeed, we continue to work to build relationships with water systems and research potential funding sources.  Energy affordability has been in place for over 3 decades, and investor-owned utilities are already required to have low-income rate assistance programs.

In order to ensure universal access to water in California, we must resolve the issue of affordability.  Please help us work on this.