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Electronic Annual Report (EAR)

The Electronic Annual Report (EAR) is a survey of public water systems, currently required annually, to collect critical water system information intended to assess the status of compliance with specific regulatory requirements such as source water capacity, provides updated contact and inventory information (such as population and number of service connections), and provides information that is used to assess the financial capacity of water systems, among other information reported. The areas for which information is required to be reported is listed in Table 1.

 

2020 EAR Schedule (Applies to all public water systems)
2020 EAR Release Date:	March 15, 2021
2020 EAR Submission Deadline:	May 15, 2021
2020 EAR Technical Assistance Request Deadline:	April 20, 2021

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Table 1: EAR Survey Sections

The “Annual Report to the Drinking Water Program” was started in the mid-1980’s as a hard copy report submitted to the Division of Drinking Water (DDW) district offices.  The DDW field staff and local primacy agencies (LPAs) have used this information in the conduct of sanitary surveys of public water systems.  There is a Large Water System and Small Water System survey, based on system size at the cutoff of 1,000 service connections or 3,000 population.  Within the report, specific sections are identified as pertaining to only certain identified public water systems, based on classification, size or identification as an urban water supplier.

The electronic version of the Annual Report, dubbed the ‘EAR’, was first implemented in 2009 with large water systems, and with all public water systems in 2010.  The EAR survey collects data for the prior calendar year, generally during the February-March period the following year.

Changes to the EAR Survey

In 2020, the Water Board began a multi-year effort to improve the EAR survey to combine the large and small water system EAR surveys, provide additional functionality, integrate data validations, and improve the EAR user experience through the use of hide and show features and ultimately to separate out some sections into individual stand-alone surveys. This new EAR survey will be first implemented for the 2020 EAR, for which public water systems conduct reporting in early 2021. There will be continued advancements of this modernization process to improve the user experience and refine frequency for which public water systems would be required to report certain information.

EAR Data

The data compiled from the EAR is published for the years 2013 to present and can be found here.  Data for each new reporting year will be published within 90 days of the close of the reporting period.  Data from 2009 to 2013 is not available in a format that can be reconciled with the 2013-present data, so is not currently available on the EAR website.

Additional information on the uses of EAR data:

• Recommendations for Implementation of a Statewide Low-Income Water Rate Assistance Program (Assembly Bill 401): Report submitted to the Legislature on February 25, 2020
• Needs Assessment (Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) program)
• Open Data Portal publication of specific EAR data sets related to drinking water
• Water shutoff reporting under SB 998
• Urban Water Supplier Water Conservation: Production Reporting
• Water Loss Control
• Climate Resiliency visualizations
• Safe Drinking Water Plan

EAR Input Forum

In 2018 the EAR Input Forum was formed to inform the Water Board on the impact of changes to the EAR on public water system business practices, data availability and data quality.  This group is made up of public water systems, water industry organization and non-governmental organization representatives. The Water Board  engages the EAR Input Forum annually to review proposed changes to the EAR and solicit feedback on the structure of questions to ensure meaningful and accurate data is gathered.

For the 2020 EAR survey development, the Water Board hosted meetings with the EAR Input Forum in August and November 2020.  Comments from the EAR Input Forum on the proposed changes to the 2020 EAR survey were received following the August 2020 meeting.  The comments from each entity has been summarized and Water Board responses as to the feasibility of implementing any proposed changes were provided.  A summary of key comments and the Water Board responses can be found here, as listed by commenter name.

Table 2: 2020 EAR Input Forum Comments/Responses