You may have gotten the email blast from the community coordinator this morning, or read the news stories about the water conservation measures being called for tomorrow, as League City replaces a main valve.
Heck, if you're an avid reader, you may have even read recently about League City's proposed "water smart" park, and the bit of controversy surrounding its funding.
Aaaaand if you've lived in League City for a while, you may even recall the misery of the summer of 2009, when League City began with voluntary water rationing, and then proceeded to make it mandatory, rules that it partly ignored for its own purposes, with most of us finding out only later that part of the water "shortage" was actually due to the city's own gross mismanagement of our potable water assets, specifically, the expenditure of about $1 million of our taxpayer dollars on a water distribution plant that it proceeded to forget that it had even acquired!
All of this may have you thinking, WHAT is the DEAL with League City and water?!?!
That whole story would take me a month of Sundays and a river of blog posts to explain. For the moment, suffice it say that League City, like every other city of its size in Texas, has a Water Conservation Plan (WCP, which it incidentally submitted to the state a year past its due date; you might be able to yank a PDF copy of it from this site if you'd like to see it). Among other things, the WCP sets usage-discouraging billing rates, provides a promulgated framework for water rationing when conditions call for it, and defines water reduction goals, namely a 5% per capita per year reduction which, to date, I really haven't seen articulated extensively via community outreach efforts.
That's right. Your city has basically decided that we all should have a goal of reducing our potable water usage by 5% per year.
Before you get all indignant about your personal consumption habits having been decided without you being consulted, bear in mind that, to my weakly-informed knowledge, this is a fairly typical reduction goal state-wide. The issue is that the population of Texas is growing but its water resources are not. If anything, there may be a trend toward us having fewer water resources, as climate change (whether natural or human-induced) results in increasingly-frequent droughts.
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| Current conditions from U.S. Drought Monitor, as lifted from SciGuy's blog post of this morning. |
(1) Our water billing rates are high and could likely go higher in the future. One news article quoted a city administrator as noting that large irrigated lots in League City's Hidden Lakes subdivision could see water bills as high as $700 per month!
(2) We will likely be asked to conserve water on a regular basis.
What steps can we take in the face of these issues? I'll have some suggestions in additional blog posts to follow.
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