The best fire insurance is a green yard plus misters

 

The thicker the plants, the more they grow and the safer from fire you are.  Clover is a great base ground cover, but in my yard, only sticker and burr plants are weeded out.

 At our last meeting, a councilor asked me how I liked my water bill.  I said it’s good.  But that answer was incomplete.  I like using our water for any beneficial use, but I don’t like the cost our City and most other cities place on such use.

The best insurance against wildfire is a green yard, and that doesn’t mean plastic grass.  When Paradise burned, the McDonalds burned, but their sign, surrounded by real green grass, did not burn.  In Santa Rosa, huge subdivisions burned for lack of defensible space, but the young trees and grass across the sidewalk did not. 

Just outside Grants Pass about a decade ago, a large pine tree burned in an unwatered yard.  Their vehicle also burned, followed by the neighbor’s fence.  But that is where it stopped, as the adjacent yard had six-inch tall fescue, which stopped the flames from reaching the neighbor's house. 

Fine fescue goes dormant for lack of water readily and cannot be revived until fall.  Tall fescue grows roots eighteen inches deep. When not watered, it slowly loses outer leaves until only the innermost leaves survive.  It does not go dormant.

Water is the death of fire.  Any plant with water flowing through it is safe from wildfire, particularly with other watered plants around it.  Misters are surprisingly cheap to use, even at our present high unit rates, which are made to make poor and lower middle class people not use as much water as they need, while wealthier or more determined gardeners use what they need regardless of price.  Rock doesn’t stop a gravity-wind-driven fire.  Blowing embers cross everything except watered plants, sprinkler water and mister vapor.

Everyone should be able to water their yards, at a price that pays for the true unit cost of cleaned water.   Normal cost accounting for utilities puts all their infrastructure, employees, and office costs in base rates to pay overhead, costs that are steady over the months of the year, while unit costs (about 1% of utility costs) rise and fall with production.  Sewer is base rate only because its volume cannot be directly measured.

 

3-minute speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 7-1-26

published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Posted on Facebook, Nextdoor and X.com

 

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

Cities ration water by rates

The Grants Pass City Water Treatment Plant is being replaced, because of neglect in the first two decades of water rationing by rates.

 @AGPamBondi Of all our utilities, water is the most dangerous to ration by rates, but the vast majority of cities in the U.S. are doing just that, over the last 40 years. It is done by dropping the base rate and hiking unit rates by labeling much of the overhead as unit costs, ignoring normal pricing accounting.

The idea is to make people cut back on water use. Every city does this in their own way, but they all start with decreasing the base rates and increasing the cost of units. It makes cities depend on high unit prices to pay overhead, but high unit prices make people cut back on use. Cities raise the unit rates higher and higher; eventually the base rates are increased as well, creating a vicious pricing spiral that can't be stopped until we can't cut back anymore.

Electric and natural gas utilities also have rationing rates, but they at least compete with each other. Water and sewer are city monopolies. But rationing rates are bad for utilities, government, and ratepayers. They are literally a crime: wasted water running to the ocean instead of watering land first; fraudulent science; and abuse of ratepayers.

I started the Ratepayers Revolt in Grants Pass, OR with water and sewer, which has even higher rates than water, with the introduction of sewer unit rates, based on winter water use. I am currently giving 2-minute speeches on water to our City Council. They are becoming receptive to the idea of putting my proposed Charter Amendment on the ballot to bring our rate system back to the days when water was cheap to use and sewer was all base rates.

https://gardengrantspass.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-proposed-charter-amendment-utility.html

3-18-26, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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

Coal is the only fossil fuel

 Coal is the only fossil fuel.  It was formed only in the Carbonaceous Era, when trees didn’t rot because fungi could not use lignin.  Trees died, fell, and piled up.  As dirt covered them, they formed charcoal and slowly fossilized into coal.  The Carbonaceous Era ended when fungi evolved to use lignin.

Oil and natural gas are not fossil fuels; they come, not from ancient land animals, but from organic mud that builds up on oceanic plates that eventually slide under continental plates, the mud lubricating the process, and is refined in the upper layers of the mantle from the churning of magma, heat and pressure.  

I figured this out over a decade ago.  Last year, I found an article in Live Science, “North America is dripping down into Earth’s mantle,” by Sasha Pare, April 2, 2025.  The mud on top of the plate below the center of the continent is refined into: water; salt; oil; and natural gas.  Being lighter than melted rock, they are pushed toward the surface.  

Springs of fresh and mineral water are common and keep rivers running.  Salt gathers in caverns near the surface.  The carbonaceous portion, oil, and natural gas sometimes find cracks that reach the surface, which is how mankind discovered tar pits and used tar to seal Moses’ basket and ships.  In 1859, oil was brought to the surface in Pennsylvania and refined into kerosene.  Being cheaper and brighter burning than whale oil, it saved sperm whales from extinction.

 2-4-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council

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

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook.

 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

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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

We can fix our water and sewer rates!

 

We can fix our water and sewer rates!

Water should never be rationed by price.  Every household should be able to afford to water their yard, protecting their city from fire, as it was before water-rationing rates.  Every household should pay the same charge for sewer within their water service size class, as it was before water-rationing sewer rates. 

·        No unit rates on sewer; minimal unit rates on water.

·        All water overhead paid through monthly base rates to pay monthly utility expenses.

·        Water unit costs covered by a single unit price.

·        All sewer costs equally shared through base rates, no extra charges.

·        Rates to rise by inflation of actual utility costs, not the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

·        No franchise fees.  The City cannot charge a franchise fee for a business it owns.

 

We can do this by putting a city initiative on the ballot, creating a Ratepayer Utility Rate Board for Grants Pass, passing it, and electing its members after it passes.

·        Rates will be set by an elected 5-member Ratepayer Utility Rate Board (Ratepayer Board)

·        Ratepayer Board eligibility is open to any registered voter living in a residence that uses Grants Pass water and/or sewer and who does not work for the city in any other capacity. 

·        Each member of the Ratepayer Board shall take an oath to stick to the above financial principles in setting utility rates. 

·        Each meeting of the Ratepayer Board will begin with a statement of these principles.

·        The Ratepayer Board will meet 5 business days within one week per year to set the rates and shall be compensated $100 per day for their attendance.

·        The City Manager shall provide each member of the Ratepayer Board with the previous year’s expenses of the water and sewer systems, including the Ratepayer Board’s per diem, one week before Ratepayer Board meetings begin.

 

Before we can do any of this, we need: a group to help write the petition; people to circulate the petition for the ballot; and people willing to serve on the Ratepayer Board.  All of this will be quicker and easier with money, so please donate.  We could use a website, too.  All of this must come together before we can even start to circulate a petition.  Fortunately, we get 2 years after the petition is approved to circulate to finish.  Let us know if you are interested in helping.

           541-955-9040                                        rycke@gardener.com

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Rationing rates have relatively low base rates and high unit rates, designed to cause less use of a product or service.  They give us cheap access to water and sewer service and make us pay through the nose to use it.  Worse yet, as use keeps dropping, rates are hiked by more than inflation every year to cover overhead in a very high-overhead business.   Overhead is the cost of the whole water or sewer system, bills that must be paid monthly regardless of use: debt payments; salaries; maintenance budgets; electricity for lights and computers.  Unit costs rise and fall with use of the utility, like water-cleaning supplies and power for pumping.  (Sewer will have no unit price.)

 

Grants Pass has had water-rationing rates since the 1990s but got serious about it in 2006 with much higher tiered unit rates and a lower base rate.  Water use dropped a lot. In 2008, City staff told the Council that their conservation rates had worked so well that the water plant could not pay the overhead.  Staff asked the council to raise the base rate by $3, which they said would stabilize revenues.  Council passed the base rate raise but it didn’t stabilize revenues because the unit rates were too high; the base rate was too low; so people kept cutting back on use.  After that, Grants Pass raised base and unit rates by the same percentage yearly to pay the overhead, until the City Council dedicated $3 million in America Rescue Act money to the new water plant and cancelled the last 2 yearly raises in rates for the new plant to compensate ratepayers.  But they are still raising rates by the CPI and will likely raise them to cover overhead every year.

The city started rationing rates on sewer in 2013, basing sewer units on the average of each winter month’s water use.  Sewer unit rates are especially bad for ratepayers and the sewer system because unit costs of cleaning sewage are much higher than for water.  They are particularly hard on the poor who must live many to a house and put a lot of water down the sewer.  When people cut back on water use by reducing what goes down their drains, they cut the water needed to make sewage flow smoothly.  Since sewage unit rates began, we have had sewage pumps clogging.  This is why we didn’t charge for sewer units before, and Medford and Portland still don’t.

 

When revenues don’t meet overhead expenses, maintenance is the easiest expense to cut.  Grants Pass never budgets what is recommended for replacement of pipes.  We had rationing rates for at least 20 years before we were told that our 80-year-old water plant is falling apart and we need a new one.  Electricity and natural gas utilities started rationing utility rates in the ‘70s, which is why we have had forest fires and gas leaks started by poor maintenance of power and gas lines.

 

Water-rationing rates have spread to cities around the world, making weather more variable and temperatures more extreme worldwide, causing bigger fires closer to cities, sometimes burning right through them, due to lower humidity from much less irrigation.  It’s time to start the Great Ratepayers Revolt by taking control of our city utility rates.

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

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

Cities need to stay hydrated

 

            For National Drinking Water Week, our Public Works Director tells us on the City website, “Our bodies are made up of mostly water and we need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   The same can be said for other living things in our cities that thrive on sprinklers, life that is impoverished and dying where properties dry out over the summer, due to high unit rates imposed by our cities on our water use.  

            Water is the wealth of any ecosystem.  Watering stores water in surface soil and plants, to guard against fire.  Our animals, plants, and soils “need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   

            Like money, water must circulate to be abundant.  Drought is a water depression, not enough water in the air to make rain.  Sprinklers are efficient rain makers.  Half of the water they throw evaporates, which condensed into thunderheads in 1985 in Grants Pass and made nice, wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend, the first summer I lived here.  

            In 1986, we were told that we were in drought, and “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  That summer, we went 103 days without rain.  Rationing water in a drought doesn’t help it; it makes it worse, by cutting a major source of evaporation, watering of lawns and transpiration from watered plants. 

Rationing water by price has made drought chronic, because watering is the biggest and easiest use of water to cut—and the most destructive to residents’ morale and real estate.  Dry lawns die; some trees and shrubs die with no irrigation.  Residents and landlords stop looking at their yards because they are ugly.  They feel bad because they are too poor to water their property.  They feel even worse when their neighborhood burns because of uncut weeds and little or no soil moisture.

Building water plants and watering our cities with cheap, clean water, paying our water system’s monthly bills with only base rates, made our weather increasingly moister and more moderate over fifty-plus years, and kept the price of using water low, so cheap we thought of it as free, so we could use it for any beneficial use.  We need to return to pricing our water to sell it, not to ration it.  

Clean water is not just for drinking and household use.   The first man the Lord God made was a gardener, the first woman, his helper.  Gardening, which includes lawns, is perhaps water’s highest and best use.  It reaches to the heavens and makes rain.

                       

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 4-20-2022 and the Josephine County Commissioners 4-27-22

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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

Birds Love a Fountain

 

            We bought a bird house about twenty years ago, which occasionally was used by birds over the years, but not every year.  This year, my daughter’s mate used cedar fence boards to make sills for our new windows.  He had pieces of scrap that he built a new style of birdhouse with and hung 3 of them along the east wall of our house this spring as sparrows mobbed to mate.   All the boxes were quickly taken.

            A couple years before, we built a chicken run around 3 sides of our toolshed with nest boxes in the east wall of the shed, shaded and sheltered by our neighbor’s tall timber bamboo, and put perches outside under the bamboo and a large south overhang.  Hens are well-insulated birds; they do fine outside in winter here.  That winter, I started feeding them cooked brown rice and meat along with kitchen scraps, grains, greens and mulch for growing worms.  Sparrows found the soft rice very much to their liking as well.

            This summer, I traded $300 worth of gardening labor for a wonderful heavy fountain that had not been filled for years.  We put it in my front yard near a sweet gum and a witch hazel full of evergreen China Blue vine, out front of our picture window.  Having to top off the fountain every day helps me remember to water my potted plants and pull weeds out front. 

The sparrows love the fountain.  Other birds also visit: hummingbirds; chickadees; a flock of quick, tiny birds; and a jay.   We have watched the smaller birds eating pests off our garden plants.  Recently, we added a hummingbird feeder outside our dining room window which is being well used.

The "quick, tiny birds" were Ruby-Crowned Kinglets. I finally got a good look at one and found its name by searching "tiny gray birds with red spot on head."

Having water, food, and bird houses and a huge twisty willow tree in our yard has filled our yard with birds.  This fall, our sparrows and hummingbirds raised an extra set of young in October because they had everything they need.  A hummingbird was recently singing his territory.

We have cats outdoors.  They haven’t made a dent in the bird population.  What has been depleting the number of birds, bees, and bugs in our city and our world is lack of water.  We rarely see or hear mosquitoes in Grants Pass anymore.  Because of water-rationing rates, we haven’t been watering our yards or our birds like we used to during the 50 years when water was so cheap to use, we thought of it as free.

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-17-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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

A pond drains my yard; a willow shades it

 

            We moved to Grants Pass in 1999 and bought a house on Bridge Street in October.  The first winter, our backyard flooded with water.  In the lowest point of our backyard, I dug a small pond to capture the water and pump it out to the street.  I eventually lined it with rubber and then rocks and made a watercourse and fall on the mound of dirt from the pond, lined and covered with rock.  I put a pump in the pond and laid irrigation line to send excess water to the street and added a line to the top of the watercourse, so I could flip switches to change it from pumping out, to recirculating, and back.

          The next spring, I stuck a twisty willow twig in the ground on the other side of the mound.  It grew fast and well, to about fifty feet tall and wide in about ten years.  Its girth is now one hundred eleven inches at three feet.  For a twisty willow, it is very strong and has not lost major branches in snowstorms like some have. 

The shade from that tree covers most of our backyard near the house after one o’clock PM and allows my grandkids to play on a little swing set and swim in an above-ground pool on hot days. It is vital to our use of our backyard.

          Two years ago, I wanted to redo the pond liner and we took the rocks and liner out and reshaped it a bit.  Last winter, it refilled and stayed filled, despite the dry spring.  I decided that twenty years of water in it had compacted the soil sufficiently to leave out the liner and just replace the rocks. 

This summer, the ground within six feet of the pond on the opposite side from the willow stayed moist but still firm underfoot, and our roses within that damp zone were happier than they had ever been.  The willow apparently sucked water only from the soil and the pond on its side.  It had no die-back and dropped far fewer twigs and leaves over this summer.

On the other hand, this magnificent tree has become expensive over the years and especially this year as it sucks as much water as it needs, because of the high and rapidly rising price of city water by the unit. 

This is another reason why we should not conserve water by rationing through high unit rates.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-4-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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

Big tech data centers spark worry over scarce Western water

 

I read a shorter article about this in the Daily Courier. This article is much longer and answers some of my questions. But the writers and the worriers seem to think that the water in the Columbia and other major rivers comes only from rain and snowmelt.

The water in our rivers mainly comes from springs that pours out of cracks in the Earth's crust from the mantle, which is soaked with water. Otherwise, our river would run out in the 100-day droughts we have had in recent years.

The Columbia River is a mighty river indeed. The Rogue River doesn't compare. But the 3.9 million gallon water right that Google bought with their land is nothing next to what the City of Grants Pass pulls out of the Rogue every day. Our plant can produce 20 million gallons of clean water per day. We put much of it back in the river, cleaned to drinking water standards after sewage treatment, and so does Medford and its suburbs.

Associated Press reporters seem to think that water is a scarce and precious resource, when it is the most abundant and automatically recycled resource on Earth, next to air. The water cycle plus modern water and sewage treatment make it really hard to waste water, except by letting it run straight to the sea without being used along the way.

"About an hour’s drive east of The Dalles, Amazon is giving back some of the water its massive data centers use. Amazon’s sprawling campuses, spread between Boardman and Umatilla, Oregon, butt up against farmland, a cheese factory and neighborhoods. Like many data centers, they use water primarily in summer, with the servers being air-cooled the rest of the year.

"About two-thirds of the water Amazon uses evaporates. The rest is treated and sent to irrigation canals that feed crops and pastures."

And "evaporation is waste," we were told in Landscape Management by a teacher who was selling us on drip systems. It is a common trope among modern water conservationists. But evaporation is not waste; it makes humidity, clouds and rain.

West of the Rockies, our water vapor, from any source, makes clouds and rain in the local area first if there is enough of it. (Water-rationing rates in our cities keep that from happening as much as it used to.) What is left blows uphill and upstream on the prevailing western wind, making rain as it rises, filling creeks and rivers before the remainder goes over the mountains to join vapor from other sources, like irrigation, and make more rain.

Drought is a self-fulfilling prophecy in Oregon, because it is declared every time we don't get enough snowpack to keep our reservoirs full. They fail to take into account the effects of irrigation, evaporation, and the water cycle. Real conservation of fresh water is keeping water from running to the sea so fast.

Beavers did it before man came to North America, building dams and swamps until every rivulet, creek and small river valleys were filled with their dams and swamps. Water tables were high and the continent was full of game. After they were nearly wiped out, man began to do some of what they did with bigger dams and watering farms and cities, storing water in the soil that not only grew plants but kept rivers higher from runoff, above and below ground.

Now our cities are mostly dry ground with only a portion of the residents actually watering their properties, and have started burning because of that dryness, not only within them, but in the countryside around them, because there is less watering vapor to spread out and keep things moist.

Water is the basis of life. That doesn't make it scarce or precious; it makes it vital to living and living well. Brown and yellow is not the new green. It is the ugly color of fire danger and less life, because there is less water in the land, even right down next to the river in the photo with this article.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/big-tech-data-centers-spark-worry-scarce-western-80730977?fbclid=IwAR1z7jbzkg_1dwcoXVIjeDSs1iSdWyo442kq_cDh-_mZvMJkS79pKDC_F3c

Why Should We Save Water?

 

            I agreed with ninety-five percent of the Mayor’s Proclamation, “Imagine a day without water,” I really liked the word, “vital.”  I agreed right up to the end, where she asked us to please help the city provide clean, pressurized water by conserving it.

          How does buying less of the product the utility is selling help the utility, the ratepayers or anything in any way?  Selling water is now vital to paying its overhead.

Utilities are high-overhead businesses.  From the time our water system was built until the nineties, we paid all the overhead, the monthly expenses of the system, in monthly base rates, and only marginal unit costs in unit rates. 

No matter how much or little we used the service, the overhead was paid every month and base and unit rates stayed low and stable.  If we had a breakdown in the plant that kept it from treating any water for a month or more, the overhead and unit costs would still be paid, and our water utility would not go bankrupt.

Since sometime in the nineties, ratepayers have been charged rationing rates on water, with a lower base rate and higher unit rates.  Unit charges were most of my bill in summer of 2001.  But few people stopped watering until 2006, when rates were restructured to greatly discourage irrigation.  The base rate dropped more, and units were hiked enough to make many people stop watering, the easiest use to cut, as the Great Recession began.  Banks didn’t water their repossessed properties, either.

Two years later, Staff told the Council that the new rates were working too well.  People had conserved so much that the utility was unable to pay its overhead!  Staff asked Council to raise the base rate back to where it had been before, which would stabilize the rates. 

But use kept dropping, and both base and unit rates kept rising.  Unit rates are too high.  We’ve been chasing the overhead and cheating on maintenance ever since as rates keep rising faster than inflation. It is the easiest overhead item to cut, just like watering is for homeowners and banks.  Now our ninety-year-old water plant is slowly falling apart and we have to build a new one.

I had a live-in boyfriend.  After two years, I knew I couldn’t marry him.  After ten years, I decided to stop making the same mistake every day and gave him thirty-day notice. 

We’ve had over twenty years of water-rationing rates, fifteen years of seriously rationing rates.  When will we stop making the same mistake? 

                             

Three-minute comment to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-20-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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