Drought: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

 

In 1986, we were told in late spring that we were going to be “in drought” that summer, so “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”

I bought that story, not realizing that Oregon declares drought if there might be insufficient snowpack to water the city because of a warm, wet winter.  A foggy winter, which is dry after the sun burns through the fog, also triggers a drought forecast, as fog in the valleys doesn’t contribute to snowpack.  1985-1986 was a foggy winter, with fogs that lasted for weeks.^*

We had 103 days without rain that summer.  I was not surprised, as a drought had been declared. 

I left Grants Pass in the fall of 1986 and didn’t know, until the Daily Courier in 2018 published a list of years close to 100 days without rain, that 1987 was also a drought year, with 97 days without rain.

I eventually realized that a drought declaration before the fact is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Rivers depend on springs more than snowpack to keep them running, as we could see every time we’ve had a summer without rain in the last 20 years.  Springs depend on the water that is pushed out of the mantle of the earth; they don’t depend upon snowpack.

 

*  Eager: The surprising, secret life of BEAVERS and why they MATTER, Ben Goldfarb, “drought, wet” pgs 100-101. Published 2018.

 

10-15-2025 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook and Nextdoor

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Hiking units for a new water plant

 

Our old water plant.  The new one has only started to be built, a few blocks away.

 At your workshop, City Manager and Staff went straight to hiking our already high unit rates to satisfy lenders that we can pay the debt we are about to incur.  But higher unit rates bring lower use, which staff habitually fix by hiking unit and base rates even higher. 

Lenders will be satisfied if you would return our rate system to what worked for 50 years: paying all the overhead, monthly bills that do not rise or fall with production, including debt payments, maintenance and contingency funds, with our monthly base rates, and charging one low unit rate to pay costs that rise and fall with production of cleaned water.

The time to start doing it is tonight, by voting no.

Water is not precious, it is vital. Rationing our water is killing plants, animals and people, with drought, fires and floods. Rationing water by high unit prices has returned our weather to the time before water plants were built, when cities burned and forest fires were huge.

We don’t want our city to burn.  We want it to be clean, green and beautiful, like it was in 1985, when we watered our yards because water was cheap to use.

 

11-5-2025

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

We need sprinklers to make rain in summer

I came to Grants Pass in the fall of 1984. Water and sewer utility bills had $25 for base rates: $20 for water; $5 for sewer. Units were literally pennies on the dollar. Come July and August, our utility bill rose to just over $26. We had thunderstorms nearly every weekend in the summer of 1985. 

I love thunderstorms, but I wondered: “Why only on weekends?” If it looked like rain and I didn’t water, it did not rain enough to make a difference. A Grants Pass gardening superstition was born; “If it looks like rain, and you don’t water, it won’t rain worth a darn.” 

Sixteen years later, in Landscape Management class, I learned that most residents of Grants Pass didn’t have automatic sprinklers and watered only on the weekends. Our teacher also told us, “Sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw before it hits the ground--and evaporation is waste.” 

But evaporation is not waste; it is the first step in the water cycle: evaporation; condensation; precipitation. Without enough sprinkler evaporation and transpiring plants, we get no rain in summer; the last three years excepted because Hunga Tonga threw 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere on January 15th, 2022. It’s still coming down. 

11/5/25 

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Neighborhood and X

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Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040         rycke@gardener.com

When Water Was Cheap to Use

I moved here in the fall of 1984 and started gardening, hauling leaves full of earthworms in the outer foot of the piles from the leaf dump near Riverside Park.  Come spring of ‘85, when I started watering, the water bill was just over $25 in base rates: $20 for water; and $5 for sewer.  Water unit rates were pennies on the dollar and no unit rates on sewer.  In July and August, it got just over $26 from irrigation.  Our City was clean, green and beautiful and forest fires were far from any cities.

We had thunderstorms nearly every weekend of that summer.  I was enchanted by thunderstorms, but wondered: “Why only on the weekends?”  Sixteen years later, taking Landscape Management at RCC, I learned that most people couldn’t afford automatic irrigation and had to water on the weekends, hauling a sprinkler around and using mechanical timers.

Back in 1985, I learned that if I didn’t water because it looked like rain, it wouldn’t rain enough to make a difference, as many other people felt the same.  I created what I called a gardening superstition: “If you don’t water because you think it will rain, it won’t rain enough to matter.”

 

10-1-25-2025 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook and Nextdoor

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener     541-955-9040     rycke@gardener.com

Hunga Tonga Heat

 

 Last meeting, I talked about how Hunga Tonga has made fall through spring wet, and the rain was early this year in mid-August.  But seawater in the stratosphere doesn’t only make clouds and rain; it also makes heat, because water vapor is the most powerful and abundant of greenhouse gases, and in the stratosphere, it has few molecules in the way of infra-red heat reaching the ground.   

The first two years after the volcano blew 150 million tons of water into stratosphere, we had much hotter 100-degree-plus weather in July and August. But that heat showed up only on clear days, which one would expect.  This year, it happened on partly cloudy days most of the summer.  It reminded me of the weather in Arizona during monsoon season, and we have been getting more monsoon weather coming from the Southwest this year.

This makes me think that there is a bell curve to the amount of rain coming out of the stratosphere, and we are in the middle of the curve, if scientists are right that Hunga Tonga weather effects will last only five years.

The forecast for this winter calls for a warm winter with a lot more rain.

 

9-17-2025 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook and Nextdoor

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

Hunga Tonga

           

 Eruption touching space, 1-16-2022

Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai is an underwater volcano in the South Pacific.  It was 450 feet underwater when it started to erupt December 8, 2021.  It built a cinder cone that reared up over the waves.  January 15, 2022, it blew its top 450 feet under water. 

It scattered the cinders as it threw 150 million tons of seawater up through the troposphere; the stratosphere, and punched the mesosphere, touching space and leaving a visible hump that is on the NASA website.  Search NASA, Hunga Tonga.

That water in the stratosphere has been slowly falling into the air where weather is made, which was first noticed on our West Coast in September of 2022, causing flooding and mudslides in California, according to the Los Angeles Times.  December 31, 2022 is when Wikipedia says it started flooding California.  It continued through spring 2023.

Wikipedia blames it all on climate change, though it mentions some unnamed scientists saying it could have other causes.  It doesn’t mention the underwater volcano that sent 150,000,000 tons of seawater into the stratosphere, a nameless one-day wonder on the evening news, a bit of video showing the blast expanding as it neared the satellite directly above it.  It will be affecting our weather for a several more years.

 9-3-2025 2-minute Speech to the City Council

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook and Nextdoor

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

A Proposed Charter Amendment: Utility Bills; Principles of Rate Setting; and Contingency Funds.

 

Our "falling apart" water treatment plant, about two blocks from the place we will be building a new one this year because of lack of maintenance early in the rationing-rate system.

Section 1. UTILITY BILLS: Only water and sewer charges shall be on City of Grants Pass utility bills.  Failure to pay City Utility Bills shall be the only reason to shut off water except for infrastructure maintenance, ordinances to the contrary notwithstanding.

      

Section 2.  PRINCIPLES OF RATESETTING:

 

A.    Monthly base rates for water shall pay all overhead, expenses that do not rise and fall with the volume of cleaned water produced.  Base Rates shall be based proportionally on water service size, per connection.  Base rates shall rise by actual inflation of the previous year’s overhead costs over the year before.

 

B.     A single unit rate for water shall pay for all unit costs, which rise and fall with the volume of cleaned water produced.  Water unit rates shall be total unit cost the previous year, divided by the number of total units produced the previous year.

 

C.     Base rates shall cover all sewage treatment costs, with rates to be based proportionally on sewer service size, per connection.  Sewer base rates shall rise by actual inflation of sewer costs in the previous year over the year before.

 

D.    Bulk water haulers shall pay the ¾ inch base rate per month, plus the city’s unit rate times 1.336 per 1000 gallons, to make all unit rates equal per gallon.

 

Section 3.  CONTINGENCY FUNDS

A.    Overhead and unit cost expenses shall include separate contingency funds to cover actual inflation of expenses during the year for each utility.

 

B.     There shall be a separate contingency fund for maintenance of infrastructure for each utility.

 

-end-

 

 

 

 

Talk or write to your Mayor and City Councilors

About putting this proposed Charter Amendment on a special election ballot ASAP.

 

Mayor Clint Scherf                                                      541-450-6000              cscherf@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Rob Pell                    Ward 1 NW                451-476-7578              rpell@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Indra Nicholas           Ward 1 NW                541-450-6000             inicholas@grantspassoregon.gov           

Councilor Rick Riker                  Ward 2 NE                 541-479-7333              rriker@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Victoria Marshall      Ward 2 NE                 541-450-6000              vmarshall@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Eric Schoegl               Ward 3 SE                  541-450-6000              eschoegl@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Seth Benham            Ward 3 SE                  541-450-6000              sbenham@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Joel King                    Ward 4 SW                541-761-7538              jking@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Kathleen Krohn         Ward 4 SW                541-450-6000              kkrohn@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Mayor and Council@grantspassoregon.gov

 

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener              541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com