Over the last decade, water bills in Los Angeles County have risen nearly 60% on average, outpacing inflation and adding to financial strain for low-income households, according to a UCLA report.
The researchers compared average costs for the same amount of drinking water in 2015 and 2025, and said the results show water affordability is an escalating problem in Southern California.
“It is concerning that we have this trend of rates outpacing inflation,” said Edith de Guzman, a cooperative extension water researcher at UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation.
She and co-authors said several factors have led to higher water costs, including local decisions to upgrade aging water delivery systems and prepare for drought, and compliance with water quality rules.
In addition to water costs, the researchers looked at quality as they updated their Southern California Water Systems Atlas with details on 663 water systems across six counties that serve about 40% of California’s population. They said the fact that hundreds of water utilities serve the region’s residents shows just how fragmented water provision is in California, and how that leads to disparities.
Suppliers include large city-run agencies, smaller districts, investor-owned utilities and mobile home parks, among others.
In 2012, California became the first state to declare safe and affordable drinking water a human right. As rising bills have left more customers struggling to pay, some have advocated for permanent rate assistance programs, but those have have yet to be adopted by state or federal officials.
The increases in water rates, which are approved by utilities based on their costs for delivery, are on track to become a bigger problem in the next 20 years as aging systems require more investment and regulations on contaminants get more stringent with advancing science, said Gregory Pierce, director of UCLA’s Human Right to Water Solutions Lab.
“We have to invest more. But the money has to come from somewhere. And I guess right now we’re just saying, ‘It comes from you, local ratepayer, so you’re on your own,’” Pierce said.
If California is really going to deal with affordability, there should be an effort to look for solutions for those who struggle to afford utility bills, De Guzman said.
“Somebody has to pick up the bill,” she said. “It is increasingly challenging for some of our neighbors to do that, and if we don’t think about how to generate the political will and provide assistance to those communities, we will not only fail to achieve the human right to water, but we will be leaving a lot of our neighbors behind.”
The report by UCLA and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, which also includes a mapping tool presenting local data, reveals disparities among water agencies, with poorer communities often paying as much or more than those in wealthier areas. The map enables users to zoom in and see how many people a certain water district serves, and how many violations it’s had in the last five years.
People who get their water from small water systems often face more contamination problems.
Providers in largely rural Kern County had the highest number of water contamination violations among the counties studied. More than half the county’s systems had violations, with 91 systems cited 1,546 times over the last 10 years, more than three times higher than any other Southern California county.
Many of the violations were for unsafe levels of arsenic or coliform bacteria. The contaminated water in Kern’s small farming communities reflects chronic problems “tied to agriculture, groundwater contamination, and under-resourced small systems,” the report said.
The researchers found that about 88,000 people across Southern California rely on systems that have had five or more violations of drinking water regulations in the last five years. The vast majority, about 76,000 people, live in Kern County.
The findings underscore the need to improve those small water systems, De Guzman said. “I hope this tool makes obvious the inequities.”
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