Appendix A identifies the city served by each retail water supplier. For this bulletin, city is used in a broad sense, from the geographic extent of a concentration of residences and work places, to a metropolitan area, central city, and suburbs. A city in this sense is a named community and may be incorporated or not. This is for comparison with the water supplier's estimated service area population. In some cases, census information is used with persons per connection information to estimate service area population.
Some agencies are unable to complete the form as requested for various reasons.
In some cases, their accounting system does not aggregate the requested data, or totalizing meters have not been installed on intake lines to the system. Many systems in the Central Valley and some remote areas do not meter some or all residential customers. Some agencies are unable to identify total services or to accurately count the individuals within their service area. A large part of the data analysis process involves checking data for accuracy. Each water agency has a unique water system, accounting method, and data collection technique.