Al Austin

The City of Long Beach Water Department's Strategic Plan outlines a roadmap to ensure a reliable, sustainable, and resilient water and sewer utility for its customers. The plan is structured around six core guiding principles: maintaining water and sewer system integrity, managing resources for self-reliance, ensuring efficient financial stewardship, fostering a productive and customer-focused workforce, and engaging in collaborative government relations. The overall vision is to be a recognized leader in water conservation and innovation, contributing to a sustainable community, developing partnerships, and cultivating a quality workforce.

The Long Beach Water Department's 2020 Urban Water Management Plan outlines a comprehensive strategy for managing the City's water resources from 2020 to 2050. The plan forecasts future water demands, assesses supply reliability across diverse hydrologic conditions, and details actions for water supply reductions. It prioritizes increasing local supplies through groundwater production and recycled water use, reducing dependence on imported water, and implementing aggressive water conservation and efficiency programs to ensure a resilient and reliable water future for the City.

The resolution addresses fixing rates and charges for water, sewer, and gas services. It incorporates an 11% increase for water rates and an 8% increase for sewer rates. Additionally, it includes adjustments to natural gas rates and therm allowances to align with Southern California Gas Company rates. The resolution also establishes charges for water service, sewer service, and gas service, including daily service rates, volumetric sewer rates, and capacity charges. It outlines conditions for water shortage rate increases and defines terms related to billing and service types.

This Water Resources Plan for the Long Beach Water Department provides a long-term strategy to ensure reliable water supply by adapting to future conditions, including threats to local groundwater and imported water, regulatory requirements, and climate change. The plan involves forecasting water demands, assessing supply availability, developing planning scenarios, evaluating and ranking various regional and local supply options, and formulating an adaptive management strategy. Its core objectives are to provide reliable and resilient water service, meet water quality standards, and operate in an environmentally responsible and cost-effective manner.

This document establishes the Public Policy Priorities for the Long Beach Utilities Department for the 2025-26 period, guiding its policy advocacy before local, state, and federal governments. The plan is structured around key service areas: water, natural gas, and sewer, complemented by cross-functional topics including affordability, sustainability, efficiency, resilience, and customer financial assistance. The overarching goal is to enable timely and flexible engagement with policy opportunities and challenges, influence legislation, funding, and regulation, and achieve optimal outcomes by reducing costs, managing risks, enhancing safety, preparing for disasters, promoting environmental principles, and applying an equity lens to policy implementation.