The Natural Gardener: Watering Is Not Waste

          Oregon water law allows any use that is beneficial.  It forbids waste, which it defines as using more water than necessary for any beneficial use or use that benefits nobody.

            Watering one’s property is not waste, even outside the irrigation season, so long as there is a good reason for it, like keeping the cracks in the ground open around a well, so water continues to flow into it.

            Indeed, it is difficult to waste water by watering, except by overwatering, which makes soil so wet it is difficult for plants to grow and encourages crane flies that eat grass roots.  This harms the yard, but still contributes to humidity.  Water that sinks into the soil recharges the water table and/or eventually flows through ground to the river.  Water that is taken up by plants grows plants or is transpired into the air.  Sprinkler watering washes plants, removing dust and fungus spores.  Water that transpires or evaporates from plants, the sprinkler and the ground makes the air cooler and more humid and makes clouds and rain.  Using cleaned city water prevents contamination from E. coli and other nasty germs.

            The water cycle works better if we work it.  In the ‘80s, at the height of sprinkler irrigation, nearly every city property and county farm was irrigated; Grants Pass was clean and green.  We had wet thunderstorms nearly every week in Grants Pass, though usually not enough to stop watering.  There were bigger rain events in July andAugust than in June and September.  There was more rain in Medford than here, and more rain in Klamath Falls than Medford, in midsummer, because everyone was watering, and water was building up and falling as it traveled uphill and downwind, filling creeks along the way.

But in the ‘80s, we started hearing that fresh water is in short supply and we should save it, regardless of local supplies and conditions.  After 30 years of “saving” water in Grants Pass and Medford by price rationing, the situation has reversed, with smaller, fewer rain events in midsummer and dry lightning being more common than thunderstorms, making bigger, more frequent forest fires.  Half of Grants Pass has gone dry, weedy, seedy, and littered in summer because so many people stopped watering, mowing and maintaining their yards.  We have had yard and forest fires in the City because of that lack of maintenance. 

I was told by a city staff member on several occasions that Oregon law requires tiered rates, or the state could take part of our water right.  I asked him to show me that law.  He could not and asked me to look for it.  I did, reading the state water manual and searching Oregon water law.  I found a law which says that the state wishes us to save water, but no mandate to do so, and nothing about unit prices or tiered rates.  I found a law which says that if a city saves enough water that it wants to do something not already in its permitted water right, it must ask the state Water Board for permission to do so. If the Board disagrees with that use, it can take that part of the city’s water right.  So, the only danger I could find to our city’s water right is if we save water, not if we use it beneficially.

          Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.  Like Garden Grants Pass on Facebook

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Litter is tagging, marking the territory of the disorderly.

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

The Natural Gardener: Price Water and Sewer Fairly

It doesn’t take a rate consultant to create fair water and sewer rate systems.  Generally accepted accounting principles would take all the fixed “overhead” costs and pay for them through the base rate, and pay for the unit costs, which vary with the amount of clean water produced and delivered, in the unit price.  This pays for the cost of providing clean water in the base rate, pays for unit costs in the unit price, and keeps the finances of the plant stable.

It takes a rate consultant, using arcane formulas, to assign overhead costs to particular customer classes’ unit rates and thus give governments, businesses, apartment dwellers and smaller households lower rates than larger families in single family homes, who are often poorer people sharing increasingly high housing costs.

When I lived here in the ‘80s, we paid $25 per month for water and sewer. The city was clean, green, and beautiful. When I moved back here in 1999 and bought a house for me and my two children, I paid between about $50 in the winter and $75 in the summer.  The difference was that the water base rate was $13 lower and unit costs were charged.  This city was drier and dustier than before.

In 2005-2006, the City hired a rate consultant to devise a water rate system that saved water, though the city had no need to do so, with large water right and a dam to keep our river running.  They lowered the base by $4 and started a three-tiered unit rate system, with higher marginal unit prices only on single family homes: not on governments; businesses; apartments; or PUDs.  My water bill more than doubled, bringing the combined bill to $140 in midsummer. 

A lot of people quit watering.  Within two years, the City had to raise the base rate $3 to pay the overhead.  It has continued to increase it since; it is now at $17.70, more than double the 2006 base rate, as more people stopped watering due to high unit prices.  My combined bill has risen to $183.

A few years ago, the City decided that people should pay for their sewer use based on winter water use, so that they would pay for every unit of wastewater cleaned.  My sewer bill doubled, from $20 to $40, as the base rate was cut and unit costs were charged.  They are now rebuilding parts of the wastewater treatment plant and raised wastewater rates 7% on both the base and the unit price per year for four years starting last February and 7% more each year for the next three.  My sewer bill is now over $70, as we had 7 people in our house last winter, up from 3.

Now the City plans a new water treatment plant.  Their rate consultant literally doubled down on tiered rates and high unit prices.  They will be voting to raise water rates soon.

State law requires that fees for government services be no higher than the cost of providing that service to each customer separately, not collectively.  Base rates for water and sewer that don’t cover the cost of overhead and corresponding high unit rates make larger households pay more per unit for water and sewer than smaller households and destabilize the finances of our water and sewer plants.  Ask the City Council to put all of our overhead in the bases, and only unit costs in the unit prices, to keep the utilities’ bills paid and the residents able to afford to use all the water we need.

Email the Grants Pass City Council and Mayor: mayorcouncil@grantspassoregon.gov

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