A New(ish) Twist on Conservation Justification

In the West you often hear of cities seeking new water supplies by prodding farms to conserve, thereby freeing up water that can be transferred from ag uses to urban uses.  But this article from Durango, CO discusses efforts in that state to encourage additional urban conservation in order to maintain ag uses.  Colorado has seen fairly aggressive efforts to re-allocate water from ag to urban in recent decades and there has been a lot of concern about the effects this will have on rural communities if irrigated agriculture starts to dry up.

California and New Mexico have also had experience with this and similar concerns.  This concern shot down legislation that would have created a mechanism to finance water transfers in Arizona last year.  So now the farming communities are looking for ways to protect their economies and the farmers that support them.  It's a conversation worth having.

Can Reclamation Change its Ways?

There has been lots of chatter in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the recently released Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study from the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR).  This really is a ground-breaking study in many ways: it enshrines the likelihood that climate change is likely to have an impact on water supplies in the basin in the future; it acknowledges that the lower basin is already out of kilter in the supply vs. demand equation, and is highly dependent on deliveries of excess water from the upper basin to continue meeting that demand; and probably biggest of all, it largely acknowledges that the era of large public works projects to address water needs is probably over.

USA Today - Water Rate Study

This week USA Today posted a story about rising water rates throughout the US.  The increases (on a percentage basis) are very large in some cities.  It would also be interesting to see what those changes were on an absolute basis - if your water bill is $20 to start with then raising it to $40 is a 100% increase, but still a pretty small price to pay for having water come out of a pipe in your house whenever you want it.  This is a pretty gross generalization, but it looks to me like the systems with the largest cost increases are concentrated in older eastern cities where they have probably been hit with large bills for major system upgrades to old water system infrastructure or in rapidly growing western cities that might be paying, or preparing to pay, for expensive new supplies to meet surging demands (I'm looking at you San Diego or possibly Atlanta on both counts).

The article does a pretty good job of describing the paradox of conservation with utilities - when you conserve the fixed costs of running the utility are spread over fewer units so the cost per unit increases.  This is especially prevalent in water utilities that often recover a significant portion of fixed costs with variable revenue sources.

I had a thought while reading the discussion of how many utilities are facing high costs from past borrowing to pay for infrastructure upgrades, system expansions, costs of compliance with new regulations, etc.  Did some of them possibly overestimate the revenue they would take in in future years when they had to payback those bonds, either by assuming continued expansion of their connections or that rates of household consumption would level off rather than declining?  I don't doubt that many of the upgrades that were done were necessary, but maybe they would have scheduled the work over a different time frame if they had more reasonable expectations for future revenue streams.  Or tried a bit harder to find ways to curb costs for the needed work.

Thanks to Val Little at WaterCASA for tipping me off to this story.

Putting on the promoter cap

It's that time again.  Time for me to extoll the virtues of Watershed Management Group and put out the call for donations for our summer fundraising campaign.  Full disclosure up front - I am the current vice-chair of the board of directors for WMG.  I don't make any money doing this, but I derive great personal satisfaction from watching their success.

If you haven't heard my spiel before, WMG is a fabulous non-profit based here in Tucson, Arizona that does work, currently throughout Arizona, in Southern California, in Sonora, Mexico, and in India and more recently in Burkina Faso.  Several of those locations are places where we have only begun working within the last two years, largely because of the strength of the individual donors who support the organization.  WMG has been growing by leaps and bounds because there are many people who support the great work they do, but also because there is such a huge need out there for growth of community-based programs to give people the tools they need to become better stewards of their resources.

That need continues to grow and hopefully WMG will be able to continue to grow to satisfy that need.  But they can only do it through the support of like-minded people.  And I'm certain there are at least a few of those people who read this blog.  And if you decide you like what the organization does and think there is a need for them to take on work in your community, send me a note or contact them through their website to see if there is an opportunity to expand there.  Or you can participate in one of their great training programs and learn how to do this sort of work yourself and teach others the same skills.

Check out this link for info on how to support WMG.  And if you are able to make a contribution this week a generous match from one of our donors will double your support.  Please do what you can.  Thanks.

For the Water Wonks - A comprehensive study of residential water demand in Tucson

Those who work in municipal water departments or follow trends in domestic water use have been noting for several years that household water use has been trending downwards, for much of the past 20 years.  The chart below shows percentage change in water usage per service connection for three different types of users in the Tucson Water system from 1997 to 2007.




















During a multi-year study designed to establish a roadmap for developing sustainable water policies for the region, one of the recommendations was to take a hard look at data on residential water use and try to determine why this trend was occurring.

Just this past week, staff from Tucson Water and Pima County Flood Control released the results of that study in a data-intensive report that is available here (link will download the pdf file).  This is an incredibly important report for future water planning efforts in this region.  It's also applicable to many other regions, because the trend described above is not unique to Tucson - it's showing up all over the place.

I highly recommend checking out the report if this sort of thing appeals to you.

Water Conservation in New Property Development

There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the efforts of property developers along the Colorado Front Range to reduce the water impact of those properties.

I think it's fantastic that developers are embracing water conservation in a significant way, even if you consider that they really have no choice in many cases. For some areas it has become a matter of build smart or don't build at all. Or at least be happy with building something that will make a much smaller profit. But something that tends to get lost in the self-congratulatory language of these developers is that maybe the choice shouldn't be between a high-water-use development and a low-water-use development but between any development and no development.

If you're talking about a new development on untouched land I would much rather see it remain open space than see the most environmentally-conscious, low-water-use development in the world be built there. However, if you're talking about converting an existing use - farming or low-intensity development - to a new higher-intensity use, then by all means they should make every effort to limit the impact on local water supplies.

I realize it's not always so easy. When land is privately owned there are certain rights to develop land that can't just be taken away from the owner without just compensation. And often a larger-scale development offers greater opportunity to exact concessions from the developer, forcing a more limited impact on the environment than is the case when the land is divided into 36 acre ranchettes. But just because the developer is installing rainwater and gray water reuse features, and water conserving appliances doesn't make it something to be praised. After all the developer will most likely have no role in the development once built. The buyers might use just as much water as the development up the road. But for now the developer gets to be the good guy and in addition probably gets to charge a premium for homes in the development because of it's "green" features.

This stuff always warrants a closer look.

h/t to John Fleck for pointing me to the WSJ piece.