The City of Albuquerque, New Mexico — three and a half hours south of Pagosa Springs in a somewhat more arid part of the Southwest, established an ambitious goal in 1994. The Mayor and the City Council called for a 30 percent reduction in per capita water use by the year 2004 — a goal they in fact achieved — and then upped the ante, calling for a 40 percent reduction by 2014. The program involves cooperation from public housing projects, conversion of public and private landscaping to low-water-use designs, conversion to low-flow bathroom fixtures, installation of better metering systems, and experiments with recycled water for certain public uses, such as the Rio Grande Zoo.
So far, the city is on track to reach their goal: cutting per capita use to 150 gallons per day by 2014.
Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District customers, meanwhile, cut their per capita use by about 30 percent between 2001 and 2007. Nearly all of that reduction happened quite suddenly in response to the 2002 drought — and those reductions have pretty much continued over the next six years, in spite of a somewhat modest effort by PAWSD to promote additional water conservation. PAWSD customer use is now at about 165 gallons per capita per day, according to PAWSD consultant Denise Rue-Pastin.
PAWSD’s new $357 million Dry Gulch proposal, presented to the community last week, was seemingly based on current water demand, without factoring in additional water conservation successes over the next 50 years. But is the Dry Gulch project really the best way to spend the community’s limited funds?
A recent water conservation project in Atlanta, GA used grants to provide 1,500 ultra-low-flush toilets and 3,000 low-flow shower heads to older homes in that city. Organizers of that project anticipate annual savings of 30 million gallons of water — and $160,000 in annual water treatment costs. Instead of draining the community’s resources, the project actually saved money that could be used for other Atlanta improvement projects.
In Austin, TX, environmental groups are fighting the creation of a new $495 million water treatment plant, claiming that the city’s successful water conservation programs can delay that project for 20 years or more. But the water district has taken the position that the new — and more efficient — treatment plant will help save the environment by reducing the city’s greenhouse gases and pollution.
Here in Pagosa Springs, the environmental consequences of the proposed Dry Gulch reservoir have yet to be discussed. What we do know is that Dry Gulch collects practically no water from its own watershed, so nearly every gallon of its proposed 19,000 acre-foot capacity will have to be pumped uphill into the reservoir. The water will then have to be pumped uphill again — for several miles — to serve the main population center of Archuleta County, about 500 feet higher than the proposed reservoir elevation.
That means PAWSD will be pumping several billion gallons of water per year — twice.
A recent report released by PAWSD, however, shows that over 30 percent of the treated water created in the PAWSD treatment plants never makes it to any home of business — due to a rotten pipeline system that apparently leaks out about one in every three gallons.
Daily Post reporter Glenn Walsh asked about those water losses during last week’s Dry Gulch meeting.
“The Snowball pipeline and the Snowball water treatment plant, and the downtown infrastructure, seem to be the most pressing problem. So I guess I would ask the board also, since your growth estimates seem to be pretty aggressive in the Pagosa Lakes and District One — it looks like about 60 percent of the growth is forecast there — is there some concern about infilling in a district that seems to be losing 30 to 34 percent of its treated water.
“Is that a high priority as well, if most of the growth does take place in District One?”
PAWSD Finance manager Shellie Tressler took a shot at addressing Walsh’s question, assuring him that the water district is making upgrades as needed throughout the district, and is not focused solely on the Snowball upgrades mentioned in the Dry Gulch financing. She also noted that the 34 percent “non-revenue water” loss includes a number of causes other than just leakage. She said PAWSD uses treated water for its own flushing processes and for cleaning its waste treatment facility. She suggested that the district is actually “losing” only about 28 percent of its treated water.
It appears, from those figures and from the water conservation programs in other communities, that PAWSD could easily delay the need for a new reservoir — possibly for decades — by repairing its existing pipelines and instituting aggressive water conservation programs, to promote water saving measures like xeriscaping and low-flow fixtures.
When I asked Rue-Pastin is Pagosa Springs could reasonably cut its water demand in half over the next 20 years, she expressed doubts that such a savings could be achieved. But what would be the result, one might ask, of a 30 percent reduction in community water use — a reduction less than that planned by Albuquerque, for example — combined with reducing water loss from leakage down to an typical standard of about 10 percent?
My pocket calculator adds those numbers this way: 20 percent reduction in lost water plus a 30 percent reduction through water conservation, equals — I believe — a 50 percent total reduction.
That’s the reduction Rue-Pastin said was not attainable. But if it is, in fact, a reasonable and attainable goal, Pagosa Springs would have reduced its water demand by 50 percent. Would these two steps cost the community $357 million — the estimate for the proposed Dry Gulch reservoir? (Of course, if we add the interest on $357 million in bonds, we are actually looking at a total bill of close to half a billion dollars for Dry Gulch.)
With no growth to support such a half-billion dollar investment, can’t PAWSD come up with a better option? Like fixing its broken existing system, and teaching us how to save water?
Then, perhaps we could put the proposed Dry Gulch project on the back burner for another ten to twenty years — and see if the impressive growth we saw prior to 2005 will in fact return to Pagosa Springs someday. Because without that growth, we will not need Dry Gulch — nor can we afford it.