Disney’s Anaheim Resort is among the world’s most popular attractions (about 25.4 million visitors a year). Disney is the largest employer in Orange County (about 28,000 workers). And the company owns the biggest single slice of Anaheim property, ranked by assessed value ($4.7 billion).

So it makes sense that Disney was the single biggest water user in Orange County, spending $3.35 million on water last year – three times as much as Southern California tourist attractions Sea World or the San Diego Zoo, while having about six times the visitors as either park.

Orange County’s largest water users – at least those that surface in public documents – are a mix of the obvious and the obscure. They are land barons and university campuses; a technology company and a Kleenex factory; golf courses and a county landfill; posh resorts and shopping malls.

But many remain a mystery, because water-use data is private in California, even during an extreme drought. Except for when it’s not, which is often, and why we’re able to bring you this story.

No. 2 on the list is the county’s largest landowner, developer and master-planner the Irvine Co., with billings of $2.7 million from the Irvine Ranch Water District. Add to that $635,000 for the company’s residential and commercial developments served by Newport Beach and the Mesa Water District.

Nearly half of O.C.’s Top 20 water users were government entities themselves. In addition to cities, school districts and colleges with lots of lawns to water, there was O.C.’s main sewer operation, and father down the list were various Caltrans properties and even the county jail.

So sure, put that bucket in your shower, rip out your lawn and disconnect the sprinkler system. But if you really want to make a dent in urban water use, lean on your local officials to tighten the spigots at public properties.

MYSTERY

Water use has become a matter of acute interest – and public shaming – in California, to due to the historic drought, an emergency declaration by the governor, and cutbacks of as much as an agonizing 36 percent ordered for water-guzzling corners of Orange County.

Comprehensive public data on water use is obviously useful, especially in the current circumstances. But it’s mostly cloak-and-dagger stuff. The Legislature, pushed by California’s booming tech industry, passed exceptions to the state’s public records laws in the 1990s to keep most of this information out of sight.

Thus the Register had to sort through obscure public documents to assemble a database. While usage data is, indeed, private, agencies often reveal details to potential investors when they sell bonds to finance water system improvements. Sometimes details appear in an agency’s audited financial statements.

They unveil, most often, the system’s top 10 water users and how much each user paid. But the information is imperfect: The heaviest users in a small agency like Tustin may use a lot less water than “light” users in a big agency like Irvine Ranch. The lighter Tustin users will make Tustin’s top 10 list, and thus our database, while the heavier Irvine users (still light compared to the Irvine Co.) will not.

A few agencies declined to provide any information at all, including the cities of Orange and Buena Park, and the El Toro and Trabuco Canyon water districts. These were mostly smaller agencies that would not affect the top of the list.

Even among agencies that do cough up data, there’s a wild lack of uniformity that makes comparisons difficult. Most report only what customers pay for water, omitting how much they use entirely. Others just list the names of their biggest users, in alphabetical order, and say nothing more.

Unless individual water districts provide additional data, it’s nearly impossible to verify whether big water users have cut back as they say they have.

One of the odder finds, perhaps, is that the county spent more than a half-million dollars on water at the Olinda Landfill in Brea. That trash dump still uses drinking water to spray down the dirt piled atop the heap, which is meant to control “fugitive dust” and odor – a move required by air-quality officials.

“We can’t have fugitive dust escape,” said Julie Chay, spokeswoman for Orange County Waste & Recycling. “And different soils use water differently.”

The county is looking at infrastructure improvements to avoid using drinking water to control fugitive dust. There’s a power plant at the landfill, using methane gas from decaying trash to generate electricity; water cools its turbines; and the county is working on capturing that cooling water to spray down the dump. Research has begun, but there’s no timetable yet for getting it done, Chay said.

KLEENEX MILL

The city of Brea is working with the county on getting something done, spokesman Chris Reimer said, stressing that this water use is not cosmetic but for health and safety purposes “that benefit a very large regional population.”

Not far away, Kimberly-Clark Corp. – whose Fullerton mill ran up a $1.2 million water bill in 2013 – is several steps ahead of the curve. It makes water-intensive, paper-based tissues at the mill, and has been “aggressively pursuing water conservation” since 2001, said officials from the city and company alike.

The Fullerton mill recycles nearly 70 percent of the water used in the manufacturing process, and it is now among Kimberly-Clark’s most efficient water users in North America, spokesman Bob Brand said by email.

The vast areas maintained by the Rancho Santa Margarita Landscape and Recreation Corp. are irrigated with potable water. The homeowners association, which spent $1.3 million on water last year, cut back usage 28 percent over the last five months of 2014 vs. the same period in 2013. It’s examining the possibility of adding reclaimed water connections, officials said.

Disney spokeswoman Suzi Brown said the parks take water conservation extremely seriously.

While water use has had slight upticks in recent years, it was essentially the same in 2014 as it was in 2007, according to Anaheim bond disclosures. Over that same time period, Disney added Cars Land to California Adventure and welcomed an additional 4.8 million yearly visitors, according to figures from the Themed Entertainment Association.

Nearly all of the water at the Disney Resort is recycled in some manner, said Brown. Back in 2008, when Disney had to drain California Adventure’s giant Paradise Bay to prepare the new “World of Color” show, it seemed a shame to send all that water down the storm drains and into the ocean.

So Disney worked with the Orange County Water District to divert the water into O.C.’s Groundwater Replenishment System. This system – hailed as the future by many water experts – treats waste water to a high level of purification, then injects it into the earth so it can replenish underground drinking water basins and keep seawater from intruding on same.

OCWD, in its turn, praised Disney for its efforts, and encourages other businesses to follow suit.

“Since 1955, water conservation has been one of our key environmental goals,” Brown said by email.

The Irvine Co. said much the same. Nearly 50 years ago, it helped create the Michelson Water Reclamation Plant that’s owned and operated by the Irvine Ranch Water District, said spokesman Bill Lobdell. The plant recycles some 20 million gallons of water daily for Irvine and parts of Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Lake Forest and Orange.

Nearly every retail, office and apartment community in Irvine – 91 percent, as well as parks, greenbelts and medians – uses recycled water for landscaping, Lobdell said.

To meet Irvine’s goal to reduce consumption by 16 percent, the Irvine Co. is considering changing landscape materials, expanding the use of more efficient irrigation systems, and installing more water-efficient fixtures in older apartments.

“This is a complex challenge, especially since we make extensive use of recycled water in Irvine and the Newport Coast and our newer properties already have state-of-the-art, water-conservation systems that make additional reductions more difficult,” Lobdell said by email.

Folks in Yorba Linda, No. 3 on our list, may have the toughest time: They must reduce use by 36 percent.

“We have no illusions,” said Damon Micalizzi, spokesman for the Yorba Linda Water District. “We think 36 percent is unfair. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have a significant and serious drought, and we’ll do everything we can to cut back.”

The city of Yorba Linda has scaled back on watering the 400-plus acres of landscaping it maintains. But some of that is where wildland meets suburbia, and the Orange County Fire Association requires it to protect homes from potential fires, said City Manager Mark Pulone. Meantime, the water district is offering seminars on reducing water use, and a session last week got so full it had to turn people away.

‘THE OVEN’

Other big users at the top of the list include homeowners associations for vast developments in the warm southeastern reaches of the county once dubbed “El Horno” – the oven. Thousands of new homes are slated for development here.

The Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp., overseeing a 4,000-acre development, spent nearly $1.7 million on water last year. The Coto de Caza equivalent, CZ Master Association, spent $1.1 million.

They’re all trying to conserve one of every four gallons used.

No easy task. In Ladera Ranch, more than 90 percent of the water used for landscaping is reclaimed waste water, said Ken Gibson, executive director for Ladera Ranch’s association. Some 750 acres of common areas are irrigated by a sophisticated central brain that waters based on weather, soil conditions, plant needs and evapotranspiration – water lost to evaporation or absorbed by plants – with built-in alarms for leaks and line breaks.

Drinkable water is only used for irrigation in about 1,200 front yards, courtyards, village clubhouses and pool areas, Gibson said.

In Mission Viejo, more than 80 percent of irrigation is done with reclaimed water, officials said.

So Mission Viejo, Ladera Ranch, and the other large homeowners associations to the east and south (and just about everyone everywhere else) are ripping out turf, replacing it with drought-resistant plants, encouraging homeowners to invest in water-efficient systems.

“Ladera was developed with a sophisticated ‘Riverine’ system that takes urban runoff down to the Horno Basin, of which a portion of this water is diverted back to the community as reclaimed irrigation water,” said Gibson.

And while the Orange County Sanitation District – which processes sewage for about 2.5 million people – did indeed buy more than a half-million dollars worth of water last year, much of it circles back into into the Groundwater Replenishment System, said spokeswoman Jennifer Cabral.

The Sanitation District’s plant in Fountain Valley uses about 240,000 gallons of drinking water a day, but sends 100 million gallons to the GWRS daily. There, the water undergoes advanced treatment, resulting in 70 million gallons of purified H2O being injected into the ground to refresh the aquifer.

This isn’t yet possible at the sewer district’s Huntington Beach treatment plant, but it got a $450,000 federal grant to help move that along, Cabral said.

In many ways, Orange County’s conservation efforts work against it, said Brett Barbre, who represents the Municipal Water District of Orange County. It doesn’t get much credit for having the GWRS already online, or for having extensive recycled water systems throughout Irvine and elsewhere. Everyone still has mandatory conservation goals.

“What the state board did with those mandatory goals was idiotic,” Barbre said. “If you’re living in a Hong Kong-style high-rise condo at the beach, you only have to cut back 6 percent. If you’re in a single-family home with a yard in Yorba Linda, you have to cut back 36 percent. It’s a war on single-family homes, a war on grass, a war on swimming pools. Yorba Linda is never going to make that 36 percent.”

What will happen then? If the state imposes punitive fines, it could find itself the target of lawsuits and general pandemonium, Barbre said.

Contact the writer: tsforza@ocregister.com