Utility looks to Texas for water-saving tips

Plants can only pump so much, it says

— Little Rock is wetter and a few degrees cooler during the summer than Austin, but the local water utility director has looked to the Texas capital and other cities in the South for ideas on how to encourage customers to conserve water.

“They’ve been facing water issues for a number of years, whether it be a lack of supply or drastic growth,” said Graham Rich, Central Arkansas Water’s director.

Central Arkansas is flush with water. But customers can’t pull more water out of their faucets than the utility’s two treatment plants can clean and pump out in a day.

Avoiding the cost of building new treatment plants has led the utility to purchase more property around Lake Maumelle to preserve water quality and it’s also driving Central Arkansas Water’s Water Wise program.

Mimicking Austin, Central Arkansas Water started offering free irrigation audits last summer to help residential and sprinkler customers cut down on wasted water.

Rich, who also looked at outreach programs in San Antonio and Gwinnett County in Georgia, introduced the idea of tiered rates to encourage conservation.

Since May 2010, the utility has offered a 15 percent discount to customers who use less than 2,300 gallons a month and has added a 30 percent surcharge to residential and sprinkler accounts that use more than 25,000 gallons a month.

Although Rich is contemplating asking water commissioners to add more tiers, the utility director said he won’t ask central Arkansans to pull up their lawns like Austin has.

“The reality is we have an abundance of water. We have very low-priced water and so it’s really a good problem to have,” Rich said. “But what we do see is the outdoor watering is potentially going to cause us to expand treatment plants much sooner than they need to be expanded.”

The rule of thumb in the water industry is to start designing a new treatment plant as soon as peak demand hits 80 percent to 85 percent of a utility’s maximum capacity,and then start construction once it’s at 90 percent.

Central Arkansas Water, which has a maximum capacity of treating 157 million gallons a day, found itself at 76 percent when the temperature hit a record 114 degrees in Little Rock on Aug. 3.

That day, the utility pumped 120 million gallons of water. It was the fourth highest day in the utility’s 11-year history, and 2 1/2 times the amount of water consumed during the winter.

“What we hope is we’re not going to need it for the next 20 years,” Rich said of a new plant.

All customers would bear the cost of a new treatment plant, Rich said, an estimated $60 million that would only increase the utility’s capacity to treat water by 20 percent.

The region’s growing demand for potable water is coming not from a spike in new residents, but from customers who want lush, green grass even during the hot summer.

“That’s part of the expectation of my neighborhood,” said Lance Hines, a Little Rockcity director who lives in the Rock Creek neighborhood in west Little Rock. “You keep your lawn nice and in order to do that you have to water your lawn.”

Hines was one of 66 homeowners in the utility’s service area that requested a free water irrigation audit this summer.

“I think they can do a better job of educating,” Hines said about the utility, adding, “I still see too many sprinkler systems that are watering on peak hours.”

While he was a willing participant, he’s skeptical of the utility’s conservation efforts and often wonders whether the utility is trying to conserve water or make money off people with surcharges for using more than 25,000 gallons a month.

“We are not a water scarcity state. We have water in abundance,” said Hines, whose sprinkler meter bill topped $69 in July.

Mark Brown, a Pulaski County Cooperative Extension Service agent who has been contracted by Central Arkansas Water to do the audits, hears that a lot when he goes out into the community.

“Here’s what I tell them, ‘Yeah, we have plenty of water. Reservoirs are full, all that good stuff. But it’s not going to be there forever,’” he said. “I try to get people to do that part.

“I tell people we’ve got to get this peak day demand down, and you can help with being more efficient, maintaining a more efficient sprinkler system,” he said.

Brown gives them a master gardener’s list of plants that can survive the summer with less water than more popular plants, such as hydrangeas, and checks whether they have grass for warm climates or cool climates. He checks their sprinkler heads to make sure they’re functioning properly and often suggests splitting up watering cycles so the sprinkler goes off very early in the morning and then again in the afternoon.

Hines said he will try the split water approach next summer, but said higher water bills wouldn’t stop him from maintaining a nice lawn.

Nor would higher prices stop Stanley Preston, who won the Fair Park Neighborhood Association’s Yard of the Month award in May.

“I try to keep it green,” Preston said about his lawn of mostly zoysia grass that does well in warm climates.

His August water and sewer bill topped $111, a bit high for the construction worker who has lived in his home for two decades.

“It kills me to pay that but I’ve got certain plants that people have given me, and I’d hate to see them die after nourishing them,” he said.

Despite his high bills, Preston said he continued to water with his moveable lawn sprinkler, sometimes in the hot afternoon.

“It’s not the right thing to do, but some water is better than no water when you’re watching your grass die,” he said.

Although Preston wasn’t aware of the utility’s water conservation efforts, he’s been thinking about buying a rain barrel to save runoff water to use later. If his water bill gets any higher, Preston said he’ll follow through with the idea.

“If you don’t have the money to pay the bill, you can let your yard die or you can resort to other tactics,” he said.

Arkansas, Pages 17 on 10/23/2011

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