SACRAMENTO, CA — In what one newspaper called “a jab at the Culligan Man,” the California Assembly this week passed a bill, known as AB 1366, that will give local government agencies more power to ban residential water softeners and remove existing ones, The Los Angeles Times reported September 10.

AB 1366, sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Feuer, D-Los Angeles, was among “a flurry of measures” that state lawmakers were trying to push through before the end of the legislative session at midnight on September 11, the newspaper said. It could not be determined immediately how the state Senate was acting on the bill. Passage in the Senate would mean it would go to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for his signature.

The measure has been opposed vigorously by the water treatment industry, represented by the national Water Quality Association, the regional Pacific Water Quality Association, and dealers, suppliers and manufacturers of softeners.

It has been supported by California’s municipal water and wastewater agencies, which insist that the chlorides discharged by water softeners in their regeneration cycle make wastewater more difficult and expensive to treat and pollute downstream water sources.

Opponents said the bill unfairly singled out residential water softeners as sources of salinity in wastewater. They also tried to persuade lawmakers that a more reasonable solution was to work with the industry in changing consumers’ softener equipment to more salt-efficient designs, and to identify large institutional salinity sources.

The industry sought to persuade the public that AB 1366 was an unwarranted intrusion of state regulation that would only result in hard water for the estimated one-quarter of Californians who now have residential softeners. The Times article said executives of Culligan International, the Rosemont, IL-based manufacturer of water softeners that also maintains a large dealer network, criticized the bill, according to the newspaper, as being “a Big Government grab at private property.”

A similar measure passed both the state Senate and Assembly last fall, but it was vetoed by the governor and never became law.

A few local governments and water agencies in California and across the nation have instituted softener bans or restrictions that apply only to softener owners in those areas.

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