New ‘Neighborhood Watch’ Keeps Eye on Water Wasters : Drought: Neighbors serve as key informants for agencies hunting wasteful users. Officials say calls from tipsters are up.

OAKLAND —  A residential swimming pool had sprung a slow leak late last spring, sending chlorinated water down the sloping lawn to collect in the driveway next door. One night a cold snap turned the puddles into a glaze of slippery ice.

Unable to negotiate the slick pavement, a frustrated Oakland Hills resident did what hundreds of others are doing across the state: He turned in his neighbor.

Before the driveway could thaw, a uniformed Waste Watcher--a water cop with the East Bay Municipal Water District--scaled the steep hill, cited the offending pool owner and fixed the leak.

Bob Ostini, who manages the Waste Watcher program for the district, remembers the vexed caller that morning. “He was really angry,” Ostini said. “He just wanted to get into his house.”

Tipsters are playing a growing part in curbing California’s thirst for water where rationing is in place, officials say. Irked by their neighbors’ wastefulness or inspired to save a valuable resource, they have been particularly useful in reporting such excessive uses as automatic-sprinkler lawn watering during the rainy days of March.

As a result, water districts from Irvine to San Rafael say they are relying on tenants to turn in landlords, wives to report their husbands and neighbors to snitch on neighbors for their excesses.

“We really depend on them, and they really help us,” said Larry Farwell, a water conservation coordinator for the Goleta Water District, which serves 74,000 users near Santa Barbara. “A water district can’t help its customers without them being their eyes. But don’t worry, it’s not like Big Brother or anything.”

Not by name, at least. Tipped off by a call, trained water inspectors are dispatched to the scene of an alleged violation where they search for the telltale signs of a conspicuous consumer: a moist sidewalk or water streaming down a gutter.

Without firsthand evidence of an offense, a water inspector may spend hours stalking a home, waiting for someone to illegally irrigate their lawn or wash their car.

Part police officer, part pedagogue, the drought cops who respond to neighbors’ calls have drawn mixed reaction from residents. Many who were previously unaware of their waste are delighted by warning citations and seem eager to correct their problem.

But other neighbors remain bitter about getting turned in. They hurl insults at water inspectors and surreptitiously sprinkle their lawns in the early morning, defying some community ordinances forbidding such watering.

Either way, those who are reprimanded have little choice but to comply. In many water districts, successive violations can yield fines, installation of a doughnut-shaped water restrictor in an access pipe, or even a complete shut-off of water supplies.

In Monterey, a core group of environmentally conscious joggers help keep conservation officials appraised of malfunctioning sprinkler heads and leaky pipes. Since the drought intensified, calls from them and other concerned neighbors to the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District have more than doubled, rising from 15 reports weekly to nearly 40.

“They’ve saved us a lot of water,” said Rene Paquin, a conservation representative in Monterey.

Residents in Los Angeles have been channeling their complaints to a crew of 30 so-called “drought busters” who patrol the city. Officials there said they too have noticed a steady rise in calls from tipsters.

“Most remain anonymous,” said Tom Jamentz, a conservation manager for the Department of Water and Power. Fines of up to $150 are slapped on wasters after a second offense, and terminating water delivery or installing a flow restrictor are options after that.

With a 10% mandatory water cutback from pre-drought levels in effect since March 1, Jamentz’s department has issued 15,000 citations, with only 200 repeat offenders since the latest stage of water rationing. He has threatened only one customer with a flow restrictor.

Even in incessant rain, “we still get calls,” Jamentz said.

“We don’t get as many, but they still come,” he said. “They ask why their neighbor’s sprinkler is going in the middle of the rain, for instance. Then, when it’s over, the calls pick up again.”

Palo Alto’s “gushbusters” unit patrols the city on bicycles or motorcycles, trying to spot a sprinkler gone awry or a cracked pipe. Customers there have been forced to scale back water consumption to 80% of their pre-drought readings, with an allowance of 82 gallons per person every day.

A steady downpour does not deter residents from registering their complaints with the city either, exposing the “gushbusters” to the elements.

“Rain or shine, we’ve always gotten calls here,” said Debra Katz, manager of energy services for the city of Palo Alto.

Renee Franken, one of two full-time “gushbusters,” divides her time between taking calls from resident tipsters, which average 20 a month, and patrolling the street on her 10-speed mountain bike.

“Sometimes I feel like a private investigator,” she said. “The other day, a landlord was turned in by a tenant for wasting water. I staked out the apartment, but it turned out he wasn’t using that much water.”

But lately, Franken says, she has gotten negative feedback from the water users she investigates. “Some lady called me ‘the wicked water witch’ yesterday,” she said.

Marin County’s Waterwatch Patrol, a pickup-truck crew that tracks down water wasters, has never encountered that kind of animosity. But residents there, allowed to use only 50 gallons of water a day, embrace the same concerns as elsewhere.

“They’re concerned with the fairness of it all,” said Lynn Schneider, a spokeswoman for the Marin Municipal Water District, which sells water to 160,000 Bay Area customers. “Their lawn is going brown and they look next door and see their neighbor’s--and it’s green.”

In Irvine, conservation officials mail letters to customers warning them that someone reported they wasted water and urging them to stop. Calls reporting violators have remained consistent at about 30 a month since the water department slashed allowances by 20% in February.

“If we have an idea of when a violation is happening, we send someone out there,” said Mary Krier, a spokeswoman for the Irvine Ranch Water District, which serves 120,000 customers. “I wouldn’t call these people snitches, though. That’s a bad word for it.”

Indeed, some utilities, like East Bay Municipal Water District, seem to abhor the notion that they are encouraging residents to betray one another. The district gets roughly 180 calls a month.

“We didn’t go into this with the idea that we’re going to ram something down someone’s throat,” said district spokesman Gayle Montgomery. “Our Waste Watchers are there to inform. This is not a mean-spirited, police state kind of thing.”