El Dorado Irrigation District (EID) 2011 election
Harry Norris vs Alan Day for Division 5 Director, El Dorado Hills
Fact Checks:  Review of Allen Day campaign statements
also see Summary

"The last 8 years" is inappropriate to consider the record of the incumbent. Harry Norris was elected in November, 2003, his first year on the board was 2004. In 2003 Al Vargas was our Division 5 Director, but Alan Day appears to have assigned responsibility to Harry Norris for 2003 actions in Al Vargas' term.

This affects all of the arguments made by Alan Day and other EID critics about Harry Norris' performance. The most flagrant of these the consequent falsehoods is the claim that the board tripled debt in 8 years, when in fact it increased debt by only 49% in 7 years -- its 8th year is still in progress -- and did so after avoiding new debt for 6 years.

Capacity expansion plans, based especially on El Dorado Hills population growth, were slashed by the board. This began early in the current economic downturn because of Harry Norris' awareness of EDH development circumstances.

There is some degree of excess capacity in the system but it is by no means huge. Also, it is not clear whether Alan Day and other EID critics recognize that most water and wastewater infrastructure must be sized to handle peak daily loads within peak seasonal (high summer) periods.

Many measures showing excess capacity are due to decreasing demand in the past two years, not to increasing capacity. Metered consumption of water was lower in 2010 than in any year in the prior decade. Why? It's probably the exceptionally cool and wet weather of 2009 and 2010 and is not systemic. Aside from weather, Harry Norris was the earliest board advocate of scaling down EID expansion plans as a result of his tracking of El Dorado Hills development in 2004 and 2005.

These statements are partly true, partly false. They stretch some of the facts and are invalid as an argument against Harry Norris because they treat 2003 as part of his term on the board.

• Debt has tripled (it increased by 260%) since 2002, but the only way to find tripling is to count the $172-million 2003A and 2003B revenue bonds.  Harry Norris was elected in November, 2003, and began service on the 2004 board. Those bonds were authorized when our Division 5 representative was Al Vargas, not Harry Norris.
   
• Debt has increased by only 49%, not 200%, since Harry Norris joined the EID board more than 7 years ago. 
   
  
• The final statement about "what we pay" for debt is close.  In 2010 32.4% of "what we pay" as EID customers and property owners in its district went to debt service. That level is slightly high for water and wastewater service providers, 25% to 30% is more typical. 
   
• Is this debt is "staggering"?
  Through several decades, mortgage payments have consumed a far higher percentage of this writer's personal income. I recognized it as a worthy burden and found it very mildly limiting but not staggering.

The largest debt increase of the past 8 years was the 2003A and 2003B bonds, $50 million larger than the major new debt authorized in 2009 as the first significant increase since Harry Norris joined the board 5 years earlier.

Click on the second thumbnail to see a bar graph comparison of Sacramento-area sewer rates. EID wastewater rates are higher than those of service providers using secondary treatment, lower than those of most other service providers using tertiary treatment.

Those using only secondary treatment are permitted to do so because they have high dilution ratios for discharge into a river, especially the Sacramento River. However, regulatory action is in progress to require them to use tertiary treatment. This will roughly double their rates, probably making all of them more expensive than EID.

EID wastewater rates are relatively low among service providers already using tertiary treatment. Among these, the City of Placerville's rates are about 65% higher than EID, as are several Placer County service providers.

This is an enormous stretch of actual rate data.  Click on the upper thumbnail to see the full-scale graph of actual versus claimed rate percentage increases since 2003 and 2004. Actual rates are graphed from 2004 to show increases since Harry Norris joined the board as Division 5 Director.

Click on the lower thumbnail to see a bar graph comparison of Sacramento-area water rates.  EID wastewater rates are still at low end of the range. Two years ago they had been the lowest water rates in the region. In this comparison, the City of Placerville's charges are 2.4 times EID's charges.
Rate increases were smaller than the suggested doubling for most customers. Rate formulas were restructured in 2009 to partially shift costs from low-consumption users to high-consumption users. Accounts with use less than 4,000 cubic feet per billing period received rate cuts at that time. 2011 rates for low-consumption users are still at roughly the same level as in 2007.

Summarized in a table, actual rate increases were much less than "almost doubling" from 2003 to 2011. The actual data is tabulated for 2004-2011, recognizing that 2004 was the baseline year when Harry Norris joined the board and participated in setting rates for 2005.

Case	Date range	Cost increase based on water use per month
		500 cf	1,000 cf	2,000 cf
Alan Day's statement: "...rates have nearly doubled"	2003-2011	almost 100%	almost 100%	almost 100%
Actual rate changes for Harry Norris' terms	2004-2011	28.2%	46.0%	72.1%
Average actual rate increase per year	2004-2011	4.0%	6.6%	10.3%

Actual rates in the table are for residential use with a ¾ inch water meter.

This talk is from EID critics, not from EID. Instead of "big spending", EID has been cutting costs down to bare minimums.

• EID has cut its 5-year Capital Improvement Plan by a total of $202 million since the start of 2010.
• EID has reduced employment from its record high in 2007 by 79, to the lowest level since 2001.
  Employee head count in 2010 was 74% of 2007 employment.
• EID has further reduced labor costs through furlough days and outsourcing lab operations.
• EID has placed special emphasis on measures to improve efficiency throughout its operations for years.
  Large example: Use of a solar array to nearly eliminate use of PG&E power purchases at the EDH Wastewater Treatment Plant.

There is no "Red Ink", there have been no deficit budgets.

There's at least one large accounting or reporting issue in the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, which show operating surpluses in one table and deficits in another. The difference is that the operating budget does not cover depreciation and amortization, but another table combines it into reported operating results. The difference was $18 million in 2010.  At least in the past decade, EID has never budgeted for a deficit and actual operating results have been in surplus by several million dollars per year.

Additional notes  (Detail Page 6)

"The current El Dorado Irrigation District Board of Directors has been on a spending and rate increasing spree over the last 8 years, voting 5-0 in lockstep much of the time, and they seem content with continuing business as usual.

There has been no spending spree. This board has stripped out everything feasible to remove from the Capital Improvement Plan, having cut it by $202 million since the start of 2010.Annual operating expenses have been cut by $8.5 million relative to 2007.

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