News of the Arroyo
Title: | Our View: Carrot is better than stick |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2009-07-31 |
Summary: | July 31, 2009 - The Star-News says use incentives and education to promote conservation rather than rate increases and penalties |
Author: | Editorial |
Publication: | Pasadena Star-News |
Content: | AS part of the effort to conserve water in parched Southern California, water agencies and municipalities have been working on various ways to get consumers to conserve. While presumably some of this work is out of the goodness of their bureaucratic hearts in a time of need, the water providers are getting squeezed themselves. The giant Metropolitan Water District has put them on notice that they will be receiving 10 percent less water because of ongoing shortages, especially from the dwindling Colorado River. Wells in various underground aquifers (Raymond Basin, San Gabriel Basin) need care and replenishment, but are holding up pretty well despite not getting supplemental water for recharging. Pasadena, the largest city in the west Valley, has its own, entrepreneurial Water & Power Department, which has served its community for 103 years. Faced with the cutback in its own supplies, it went through a series of public hearings this past spring setting new pricing structures for all of its residential, institutional and commercial clients. So this is the classic stick approach: Everyone is going to be paying more. Even the tiniest user, one with a small pipe from the street and current monthly charges of $8.17, with the beginning this month of a new fiscal year will see an increase of more than 50 percent on the bill, to $12.32. Larger users are in the same sort of boat so far as the percentage of their Advertisement increase. There are penalties for using lots of water, and there are complex rules about usage no-nos: You can\'t water landscaping between 9 a.m and 6 p.m., when evaporation from the sun makes it inefficient (though many still do). You can\'t water an area more than once three times a week, supposedly on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (though everyone still does). You can\'t have broken sprinklers, sprinklers spraying onto hardscape, you can\'t hose down driveways, run a hose while washing your car, serve restaurant customers water without request. Fines of $100 to $500 can be levied. Big users can be fined even more. Violators can get conveniently ratted out by nosy neighbors or passers-by on Water & Power\'s Web site. But it turns out that the carrot of goodwill and merely doing the right thing may have been overlooked. As staff writer Dan Abendschein reported earlier this month, over the last fiscal year ending in June, with no new restrictions in place, Pasadena water users had already voluntarily reduced usage by a whopping 7 percent over the prior year. There was much hemming and hawing on this, and reference to much of the conservation occurring in June, which - big surprise! - was a cloudy period, as it always is, known since time immemorial here as June Gloom. People water their lawns less when it\'s overcast and misty, naturally enough. So the rate increase and the plans for penalties went forward. We understand the need for water providers to be prudent, to cut back on outlay when they\'re getting less from the MWD. We even understand that much of the rate increases will actually go into reserves to prepare for future problems rather than into current operating budgets. But since consumers were so clearly willing to cut back on their usage simply because they knew the state is in a drought, isn\'t it possible that more education and information about the problem, more atta-boys to residents from the city for conserving on their own, is a better solution than huge rate hikes and calling out the water police? |
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