The water district says it’s time to seek proposals to conduct a water rate study since the last one was in 2011.

At the water board’s Aug. 9 meeting David Barnum, the district’s general manager, said the agency did not raise water rates this year in anticipation of an updated rate study. The study would include a district water model incorporating changes in water operations and, using that model, updating the water facilities plan. After identifying necessary projects in the facilities plan a consultant would develop an updated water rate study, according to district staff.

Locked in a multi-year drought, California’s urban water suppliers have, for the most part, happily enforced rules that prohibit specific wasteful water practices, such as hosing down driveways and over-watering lawns.

But far fewer agencies have been willing to go beyond state mandates and penalize customers simply for using profligate volumes of water. The names of those heavy users have been mostly kept secret under California public records law. That’s about to change.

As California’s two largest inland bodies of water go, Lake Tahoe is the stereotypical beauty queen — classically stunning, endlessly photogenic, fragile. Frankly, quite chilly yet eternally inspiring to legions of admirers. The Salton Sea is the neighbor tucked away at the far end of the street and often forgotten. Stark, spare, somewhat homely, beloved by only a select and discriminating community of devotees. The result of an accident. Unkempt. Sometimes — let’s be honest here — a little smelly.