Making some changes

I'm trying to play around with the design within the confines of Blogger.  I'm not convinced I like the result and might consider moving to a different platform.  If any of my 3 or 4 readers has an opinion I'd appreciate if you let me know.  And if you have a favorite blogging platform that I should check out let me know about that too.

More AZ Legislature stupidity

Many in our state legislature have signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge of Americans for Tax Reform, in which they vow to never vote for any tax increase.  As evidence of the anti-tax zeal of our legislators they even pushed through a very large corporate tax cut during the legislative session that just ended - before they got around to dealing with our current state budget, which is $1 Billion in the red.  Never mind that any future shortfalls in state revenues that might result from those budgets cuts (if the projected increased revenues due to expanded business activity in the state fails to cover the foregone taxes) will have to be made up somehow - and the state budgets are cut pretty much to the bone at this point.  They are also reducing state-shared revenues to the cities and counties, which will have to be made by either cutting local services or raising local taxes (property or sales) and forcing cities and counties to fund things that the state previously did - like housing prisoners short-term.  And more recently they passed legislation, that has since been signed by the governor, that determines how certain state agencies can spend the money they have available to them and permits the Department of Water Resources to make up a gap in its budget (caused by the legislature taking away previous general fund appropriations) by imposing a new tax on municipalities in the state (they call it a fee in the bill, so maybe they think that means it's not really a tax).

So, no, our state legislature will not permit the imposition of new taxes that would violate their pledge.  But they have no compunction about establishing rules that require other entities to increase taxes to make up for revenue shortfalls that result from fund sweeps, budget cuts, and sweetheart tax breaks to favored entities.  Way to be consistent in your ideology folks.

Nice job, Tucson

Tony Davis has an article in the morning daily congratulating Tucsonans for their thrifty water use habits.  In the article, he does a nice job of pointing out the obvious connection between conservation and giving consumers information about their water use - unmetered uses will almost always be higher than metered uses (assuming there are volumetric charges for the water).  But there is always bad news that must accompany good news (wouldn't want folks getting too cocky).  In this case, reduction in water use is rewarded by increases in water rates because of the way rates are structured in Tucson.  Here's how it works:

• Tucson water rates are set in increasing blocks - the more water you use, the higher your rate per unit of use; this is intended to send a strong conservation message to consumers
• when rates are increased most of the increase is added to the upper blocks (don't want to punish the people who are doing the best job of conserving)

Here's what Tucson's rate structure looks like on a graph, comparing it to other 4 block rate structures:

• over time, because most water revenue is derived from water sales, the utility becomes overly dependent on sales in the higher blocks to meet its revenue targets
• who do you think is most likely to conserve when water rates increase, especially rates in the higher blocks?  That's right - the users in the higher blocks, because much of that use is discretionary
• the next year, the utility projects another revenue shortfall so rates go up again, even though there was increased conservation the previous year

How do you fix this?  You restructure your revenue model so that more of your fixed costs are covered by fixed revenues (monthly service charges paid by all customers or increase the rate in the first block). 

Here's how Tucson's monthly service charge compares to those from several other cities:

This is what Tucson Water is trying to do this year, but they are certain to get pushback from the city council because of the potential impact on low-income customers.  So we'll be revisiting this issue again next year, and probably the year after that.

What's going on up in Phoenix?

Our legislature in Arizona is currently in session.  This has always been a somewhat frightening prospect, but never more so than this year.  We have the usual raft of bills seeking to demonize illegal immigrants and micromanage state agencies, but the big story this year has been the legislators efforts to collectively flip a large bird at the federal government.  Everything from re-interpreting the 14th amendment's birthright citizenship provision to seeking to seize federal property through eminent domain.  Fortunately, most of the crazier stuff has not made it out of committees or has been voted down on the floor.  But I don't consider it my job to comment on everything they do up there - there are plenty of other people doing that.  I just want to talk about some of the ideas that have been floated this year dealing with water.

One in particular caught my eye recently.  It's SB 1522, which relates to use of harvested rain water for aquifer augmentation.  The original bill would have essentially created a new form of water right in Arizona - a right to harvested rain water.  The idea was that someone could harvest rainwater on a sufficiently large scale - think cities or large subdivisions - and put that water in some form of recharge facility where it would percolate into the ground and recharge local aquifers.  The entity that collected and recharged the water would then get a groundwater storage credit equal to 50% of the water that they could verify actually went into the ground.  That credit would allow them to legally pump the amount of water represented by that credit and call it "renewable water."  This idea was being pushed by a couple of legislators from Yavapai County (i.e. the Prescott AMA and city of Prescott) where there is a very serious lack of renewable water supplies (data from 2003 - it's definitely worse now).

If there is anyplace in this state that could really benefit from large-scale rainwater harvesting, it's the Prescott area.  Problem is, this area is also where a couple of the rivers (Verde, Agua Fria, Hassayampa) that supply quite a bit of water (both surface and groundwater inflow) to the Phoenix area have a source or sources.  So it obviously piqued the interest of a few of the bigger players in the state in terms of water.  This was evident in a recent article from the Prescott newspaper. 

In addition, the legislation asked the Arizona Department of Water Resource (ADWR) to develop a new regulatory scheme that would set rules for how rainwater recharge facilities would be managed, how the water collected and recharged would be accounted for, inspection of those facilities, and presumably a permitting system and accounting system to track the water.  But the legislature, I'm sure, had no intention of providing ADWR with additional money to take on and complete those responsibilities.

Looking at the original legislation, it seemed pretty silly to me that you would go to the expense of harvesting rainwater just to put it in the ground, then pump water back out of the ground to provide to customers.  Seems a lot simpler to just spend that money buying rain barrels for people they could use to harvest their own water to then use in place of potable water.  In theory, that would permit water providers in the area to reduce their pumpage, thereby cutting into the amount of the overdraft.  But it doesn't really work out that way.  Having decisions made by thousands of individual homeowners is not how water providers like to manage their water supplies (although to some extent it is kind of like that now).  And having current customers reduce usage doesn't mean that water will stay in the ground, it will just be used somewhere else or at some other time.  This also doesn't create more renewable water that satisfies the requirements of state law, so it can't help areas that need renewable water to keep growing.

This is an issue I've been wrestling with for a while now.  How do you set policy that encourages individual water users to do the right thing AND gives the water provider an incentive to want their customers to do the right thing?  Setting prices for potable water that make harvested rainwater competitive with tap water is clearly one option - just a politically difficult one.  And somewhat logistically difficult as well, but not impossible.  The other problem is that you want customers to actually replace existing uses of potable water with other sources - rain water or gray water.  Again, if you just incentivize it by providing subsidized rain barrels or mandating gray water stub-outs on houses there is no guarantee that people won't just view that as free water with which to support additional vegetation, rather than replacing existing water uses - which would seem to lead you back to the pricing solution.  And it's important to note that you don't need to change state law to use pricing to encourage more use of unconventional supplies of water.

Anyway, the law (as amended in the State House) now merely calls for creation of a commission to study the feasibility of establishing a scheme to do large-scale rainwater harvesting.  I think this probably puts the idea of any sort of state-sanctioned water right for harvested rainwater to rest.  It remains to be seen if this commission can come up with a viable way to make rainwater harvesting a significant component of regional water management strategies - as clearly it should be in places that lack imported, renewable supplies.

That was the main bit of water legislation that interested me enough to write about it here.  If anything else comes along that gets me excited I'll mention it in an upcoming post.

Note - Edited 3/29/11 to add reference and link to Prescott Daily Courier article.

Wacky Shenanigans in the AZ Legislature

I wish I had more time to track what our legislature is up to ... sometimes.  But it seems that when I do try to pay attention lately, what I find out just makes me want to smash things.
They do have some bills in the works that affect water use, water management, and especially the state agencies that oversee water.  I should try to make a few comments on them soon, so that's what I'm planning to do next.

Development Community Attempts to Derail Environmental Water Allocations

Previously I alluded to efforts by the development community in Southern Arizona to derail plans by the city and county to allocate up to 10,000 acre-feet of treated sewage for environmental uses in the region.  These folks have decided that the process for allocating this water to environmental uses wasn't sufficiently rigorous and risks the loss of a significant portion of renewable water that can be used to support future population/economic growth.  They sent a letter to both the County Board of Supervisors and the City Council saying (among other things) that: "[e]ffluent is a highly reliable, locally available component of our region’s renewable water supply portfolio" and "the proposed IGA does not contemplate replacement of these entitlements, which are needed to promote and support regional economic growth."

Whoa!  Wait a minute.  I didn't know that this water was surreptitiously taken from some magical bucket of water reserved to support future growth in the region?  Admittedly, that is one possible use for that water - not to be turned into potable water to be provided to future residents of Tucson (unless state law changes, that's currently illegal), but to be recharged to generate storage credits that permit future pumping of groundwater to supply homes and businesses.  But this water belongs to the entities that generated the effluent (the city and the county), who are free to allocate it in ways they believe will best benefit the region.  Clearly there was some discussion within the community when the decision was made to set aside this water for environmental restoration.  I don't remember any similar discussion when the decision was made to wipe out 90% of the riparian habitat in the region so that water could be provided for the growth of the community.

But the current reality is that most of that water is currently wasted (this links to a fairly large pdf, but go to page 6 - the table shows where the water goes from the treatment plants - the row titled AZPDES discharge is what is dumped in the river; some of that generates storage credits, presently, but most of it does not and quite a bit of it actually flows out of the AMA).  It does support some pretty degraded habitat along the Santa Cruz River, downstream from the sewage treatment plants and when the upgrades of those plants are completed in the future, the quality of that water will actually support some aquatic life.  But for now, some of that water is used to supply the reclaimed water system (replacing groundwater pumping for turf irrigation), a portion of it recharges naturally along the rivercourse and earns credits for various entities, but over 20,000 acre-feet of that water provides essentially no benefit to the region.

Fortunately, both the city and county governing bodies chose to continue with plans to implement their agreements for dedicating this portion of the water to environmental uses.  But I suspect this battle is not entirely over, because parties wishing to use this water for environmental projects still have to go to the city and county to be approved to take it.  Many of the arguments being made will be made again, especially because water supplies will almost certainly be tighter at that point than they are now.  But when it comes to finding ways to restore lost riparian habitat (and especially the water needed to do so) I think this is the most promising avenue to realize that objective.  It's not elegant, it's not simple.  But it may just be effective.

Conserve to Enhance - helping the environment via water bills

While my previous post discussed the myriad problems associated with allocating water for the environment, here I'd like to talk about something novel being tried in Tucson to connect individual water conservation decisions with environmental restoration.  The program is called Conserve to Enhance (C2E) and operates by having municipal water customers here in Tucson implement something on their property (i.e. rainwater harvesting or graywater reuse) that will decrease the amount of water they use each month, leading to a regular savings on their water bill.  That savings does not come off of their bill.  Instead they continue paying the same amount and the money they would have saved is put in a funding source for environmental restoration projects that typically require a water source to establish and maintain riparian ecosystems.

A pilot program for C2E was just started, so the program has been in the news recently (see here, here, and here).  The program evolved from an idea developed at the University of Arizona's Water Resources Research Center (WRRC) that was originally known as Environmental Water Banking.  It evolved from what was perceived as a need to link water conservation activities with environmental benefits in the community.  A common complaint in the past has been that water conservation only frees up more water for new development so why bother.

I'm not involved in the program, but Watershed Management Group (for whom I'm a board member) is the entity running the program, with assistance from WRRC and the Sonoran Institute and grant funding from EPA that is providing subsidies for some of the pilot program participants to install the infrastructure necessary to realize their water savings. 

While this is a rather small step in the overall goal of bringing the environment to the table when water is being dished up it is a very big step in public perception of water conservation and how it's connected to protecting the environment.  And perhaps more than that, it's an example of people assigning an economic value to environmental amenities and backing that up with real money to provide water for the environment.  Hopefully in a year I'll be talking about how successful the pilot project has been and that plans for a full-scale roll-out are imminent.