Water Conservation Standards: Smarter, but Not Smart Enough

A few weeks back, I opined that calls to lift California’s drought-driven water conservation standards were at best premature and at worst wrong-headed.  Since then, the initial updates to the standards have begun to come forth.  They could be worse.  They could also be better.

Thus far, the State Water Control Board has floated a proposal to remove mandatory water conservation, replacing it with a requirement for water agencies to adopt water conservation plans that will allow them to meet public health and safety needs during three-year droughts.  Given recent weather patterns, it’s a reasonable approach.

But I still fear that climate change might make the three-year drought assumption an insufficient hurdle.  Perhaps not as a mandatory requirement but as an instructive stress test, I’d like to see the water conservation plans checked against a three-year drought followed by a year with 80 percent of historical average precipitation followed by another three-year drought.  I suspect the North Bay could survive the test, but I’m not sure about the rest of the state.

Meanwhile, the Governor and others are imposing water conservation measures, such as not allowing landscape irrigation for 48 hours after rainfall and requiring the use of nozzles for car washing, that will make water saving easier.  Earlier this week, Petaluma adopted new measures that included requiring not only the installation but also the use of pool covers.  As one Councilmember accurately noted, it was a “stop doing stupid stuff” measure.

But nowhere in all the discussion is my favorite approach.  How about encouraging land development patterns that use less water and less water-intensive energy?  Walkable urban development is the gold standard, and not just architecture that looks walkable, but neighborhoods and districts in which it’s reasonable for people to live without cars, conducting their daily lives on foot, bicycle, and transit.  We know those kinds of places use less water than sprawling single-family neighborhoods.

But there are other land-use options that could also make water conservation sense.  Further encouragement of accessory dwelling units is one.  Although my wife and I live on a small lot, we’re in a neighborhood with many lots of 10,000 to 12,000 square feet, with much of the area covered in light landscaping.  Facilitating small supplemental homes for the surplus land could add dwelling units with little impact on community water demand.

Water conversation is great, but treating our current land-use as fixed and then looking for water savings inside the paradigm isn’t digging deeply enough.  For many reasons, of which water conservation is only one, we should spend more time looking for solutions outside the box. 

Before closing, I should note that the low water-use plantings in our former fountain are becoming established.  I anticipate the fountain being covered by the end of summer.  It can be a symbol of our new climate change reality.  And if anyone might wonder, our lawns went away years ago.

When I next write, I’ll introduce a small change in my publishing approach.  Those who email me in alarm every time I broach the possibility of adjustments needn’t be concerned.  I’ll hold the same publishing schedule, but will take a different approach to one post each week.  More details will follow next time, along with a small handful of “Why urbanism?” links.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Water Conservation Thinking Updated

When the possibility of a drought-driven Petaluma construction moratorium was first broached, I responded strongly, supporting more stringent water conservation standards, but opposing the concept of an extended moratorium.

Listening to and participating in subsequent discussions has led me to believe that the moratorium aspect of the issue has been misunderstood by many.  With the City Council hearing on a possible moratorium now approaching, I want to share a clarification of my thinking.

But first, I want to explain why this subject matters to me as an urbanist.  Well-configured urbanism requires less water than drivable suburbia.  Much of the savings comes from the reduced irrigation of a rowhouse or an apartment compared to a single-family home.  But other factors also come into play.  To offer just one, most forms of energy production require water and drivable suburban uses more energy than walkable urban.  At the bottom line, urbanism is a good water conservation strategy.

But urbanist projects are hard to bring to the finish line.  Market and regulatory forces are often contrived against urbanism.  Despite the most diligent efforts of committed developers and consultants, urbanist projects are often fragile and prone to succumbing to hazards such as delayed adoption of a general plan or an extended economic malaise, obstacles that drivable suburban projects can more often survive.

Too many times over the past fifteen years, I’ve watched as well-conceived urbanist projects, projects that among other benefits would have reduced per capita water use, have stumbled and fallen when another hurdle was inserted between them and the finish line.

The spectre of a water conservation moratorium becoming the latest tripwire for water-conserving urbanism is too painful and too perverse to tolerate.  So I firmly oppose an extended water moratorium.

With the background, let me clarify my three key point positions regarding new water conservation standards.

Stronger water conservation standards: Strongly in favor.  The drought, which many predicted with uncomfortable accuracy, is edging into historical territory.  To not respond would be a benighted public policy.

Even those who continue as climate change skeptics should now see the logic of more stringent water conservation standards.  Even if someone argues that the drought is 95 percent certain to be nothing more than a normal climate cycle, would the person get behind the wheel of a car with a 5 percent chance of brake failure?  Common sense requires being proactively responsive to even low probability events if the implications would be dire.  And personally I put the odds of the drought being the result of anthropogenic climate change at well above 5 percent.

Long-term moratorium: Absolutely not.  We can’t risk the absurdity of losing another generation of water-conserving urbanism to the hardship of a long moratorium.

Short-term moratorium: This is the point where I think the conversation has gotten off-track.  A two-year moratorium and a 45-day moratorium serve very different purposes, to the point where it’s shame that the word moratorium is applied to both.

A two-year moratorium is a “let’s wait until things to get better” moratorium.  (A strategy that I don’t think would serve any purpose for the ongoing drought.)  But a 45-day moratorium is usually a “fresh start” moratorium.

It’s well established that the adoption of new rules setting higher development standards often result in a flood of new applications in the days before the new rules go into effect.

This isn’t unethical behavior by developers, any more than it’s unethical for consumers to stock up on stuff in the days before a price increase.  Both are simply examples of rational financial decisions.

But that doesn’t mean that the public good is served by having a flood of applications under rules that are about to be supplanted for good reason.

A short moratorium is a way of ensuring that all new applications are made under new standards.  It puts a hold on all applications until the new rules are officially adopted and effective.

I don’t have an opinion about whether a 45-day moratorium would be appropriate in the current Petaluma circumstances.   Without knowing the extent of the new water conservation policies that may be adopted by the Council, I can’t judge the need for a short “fresh start” moratorium.

But I do fear that an apparent conflation of the two moratorium concepts may result in pressure against a reasonable and justified short-term moratorium, which would in turn allow too many projects to proceed under soon-to-be superseded water conservation rules.

I’m fine with the City Council making a rational decision about the need for a 45-day moratorium as long as a more extended moratorium stays far off the table.

I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to attend the April 27 meeting.  But I’ll be following the results eagerly, hoping for good things for both water conservation and urbanism.

In my next post, I’ll touch upon springtime, revisiting some venues and ideas that become more relevant as spring blossoms.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Wielding a Cudgel When a Scalpel Would Be the Better Choice

In my last post, I wrote that changing the direction of public policy takes persistent and dedicated effort.  In my words, “stating a perspective and wandering away is a recipe for irrelevance.”

When I wrote those words, I had several examples in mind, but none that were strong enough to insert into the flow of the post.  Little did I expect that when I opened the local newspaper later the same day, a perfect example would be looking back at me from the front page.

Here’s the backstory.  We’re in the midst of a drought that is already of historic levels and shows no signing of abating.  Last fall, a candidate for City Council suggested the possibility of a blanket moratorium on building permits until the drought eased.  Two other candidates concurred that a moratorium might be an appropriate step.

Although I didn’t have a problem with a short moratorium, I disagreed strongly with the possibility of an extended blanket moratorium and wrote about the reasons for my opposition.  Nor was I content to disagree only by written word.  I also appeared before the Council during the public comment portion of their next meeting and repeated my thinking.

Public comment during a public meeting is an odd exercise.  Sometimes there are alternative but cogent perspectives on issues of general interest.  Other times, there are rants of elusive logic on subjects of dubious relevance.  As a result of the latter, the attention of the public body is often elsewhere, perhaps looking about the room or perusing documents that are further down the agenda.

As a result, I wasn’t surprised when four of the Councilmembers didn’t once glance my direction as I spoke.  But the other three, including two who had expressed possible support for a moratorium, paid sharp attention and quickly nodded in apparent agreement with my logic.  By the standards of a public comment presentation, my words were a rousing success.

When the Councilmember who had initially raised the subject of a moratorium approached me at a meeting a week later and disavowed any interest in an extended moratorium, I thought that my perspective had carried the day.

My confidence was a mistake.  Admittedly, I had other worthy uses for my time, such as working on a plan for reuse of the Fairgrounds and writing this blog, but I still should have allocated time to ensure that the concept of an extended blanket moratorium remained truly dead and that my ideas for an alternative approach were gaining ground.

I know I should have made that effort because when I opened the local paper last week, I found an article on how the mayor, one of those who hadn’t made eye contact when I spoke to the Council, was again raising the possibility of a moratorium of up to two years.  I later learned that the Planning Department was already hard at work identifying a list of projects that might be impacted.

Having mistakenly let the initiative slip away, let me belatedly reenter the fray, trying to recapture the hearts and minds that I’d already thought swayed.

I consider a response to the drought absolutely essential.  Extensive reading and a belief in science convinces me that climate change is almost certainly real and that the changes we’re experiencing in North Bay weather are likely to continue far into the future.  It’s past time to change how we use water.  Building design is one of the best places to start.

But an extended blanket moratorium would miss the mark on several levels.

For one, an extended moratorium sends a message, inadvertent but still perceived, that the drought is a cyclical, not systemic, phenomenon, that if we just wait for a few years normal rainfall patterns will reassert themselves.  But the reality is that what we’re now experiencing is likely the new normal.

For another, an extended blanket moratorium sends a message that all development is equally culpable for increased water use, when the reality is that development has a wide range of water usages.  As an analogy, it’s as if we’re responding to a gasoline supply crisis by banning the manufacture of all cars, including Priuses and Teslas along with 15 mile-per-gallon monster pickups.

So, what should we do instead?  To begin, I have little problem with a shorter moratorium of 45 or even 90 days.  We need new water conservation standards and we need them now.  (I remain frustrated with myself and with others that the discussion of a moratorium last fall didn’t trigger a meaningful discussion of new standards.)

But after the initial moratorium, we should be prepared to release projects that meet strict standards of water conservation.  I don’t know exactly what those that standards should be, but I’d be happy to join with folks willing to have that conversation.  Among the topics that I’d expect to be on the table are:

• ·         Possibilities for reduced water use through better plumbing.
• ·         Water bill surcharges to give the City funds to find and to repair watermain leaks.
• ·         Strict caps on water use, with meaningful penalties for excess use, based on self-reported counts of household residents and square feet of yard area.  (The self-reported data would need to be subject to random review.)
• ·         Requirements on developers to buy up existing water usage by paying homeowners to accept deed restrictions prohibiting grass and capping water use.

A prime reason that the initial moratorium should be of limited duration is that it’s often the smaller developers, with less financial backing, who have been proposing the more creative reduced water use projects.  An extended moratorium would have the perverse effect of driving from the business the developers who’ve been trying most diligently to address the water conservation concern.

After the initial moratorium, if we choose to put an extended moratorium, or even a permanent moratorium, on land use projects that would continue to use water profligately, I’m fine with that.

The Petalumans of a century hence are likely to look back at our time as particularly critical in the history of our town, much as we look back on the significant changes that occurred in Petaluma during the first decades of the 19th century.  And of the challenges in front of us, how we adjust to climate change is among the most important.

So the future will likely judge us by our ability to formulate effective, meaningful, and well-calibrated responses to climate change.

Picking up the big cudgel of an extended blanket moratorium, donning a blindfold, and swinging wildly in hopes of striking something useful isn’t what the future is expecting of us.  We can do better.

 (Acknowledgment: I’ve had a role in several projects that would be affected by the proposed moratorium.  I’m also talking with other developers about similar roles on future projects.  Most of these projects would benefit from the more calibrated approach to water conservation described above over an extended blanket moratorium.  However, I’ve chosen to work only with developers who have a responsible approach to water use, so it’s not surprising that my thoughts on the subject align with the interests of the developers for whom I work and may work.)

My next couple of posts will represent a major change-of-pace.  Given the seriousness of the subject of this post, I’m a little embarrassed by the change, but April Fools’ Day is upon us.

Up until about a year ago, I offered quarterly updates on the quirks and whimsy that can attach itself to urbanism.  But then I found that I always had other, more pressing topics on which I wanted to write, so I began skipping my quarterly updates.  My stockpile of whimsy and quirkiness accumulated.  The next two posts will dig into that stockpile, hopefully giving a few smiles and also triggering a few useful ideas about urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)