Then There's This: The Urge To Conserve

This photo, taken in June, shows Lake Travis' water levels still low, despite this year's rainfall. Travis and Lake Buchanan, the region's water supply reservoirs, are currently less than half full, holding a combined total of about 949,883 acre-feet of water. (Photo courtesy of LCRA)

There's no getting around it – Austin residents have embraced water conservation as a way of life, evidenced by the city's daily water usage chart, which typically shows us using less than 200 million gallons per day. (Finding the chart on the city's website can be challenging, so here's the full URL for those wishing to track daily averages for the last month: www.austintexas.gov/department/austin-daily-water-usage.)

It's possible, even, that local citizens have gotten carried away with the personal responsibility of saving water for future generations, and that conservation is taking a bite out of water sales. At any rate, the city has relaxed outdoor watering restrictions so residents can now irrigate twice a week, instead of once. It happens that on the day the city officially lifted Stage 2 drought restrictions, July 16, Austin Water Utility customers used a mere 105 million gallons, the lowest amount between July 8 and Aug. 7.

Last week, as the City Council considered a trio of water-management items from the utility, Council Member Kathie Tovo asked Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros to explain the rationale for easing up on water restrictions. This placed Meszaros in the uncomfortable position of having to reverse the advice he had given council three months* before – that the combined water levels in Lakes Travis and Buchanan should be holding steady at at least 1.1 million acre-feet before the city moves out of Stage 2.

In response to Tovo, Meszaros cited a "whole preponderance ... of factors" that figured into the decision, including the Lower Colorado River Authority's curtailment of water to downstream rice farmers. He pointed out though, more than once, that the decision to lift watering restrictions didn't come from his office but rather from the city manager's office. It should be noted, however, that it was Mayor Lee Leffingwell who set the wheels in motion after arguing at that same council meeting that keeping the once-weekly watering restrictions in place was unnecessary.

Doing a 180 on 140

Of the three related water items on the Aug. 2 agenda, the council delayed action on two until Aug. 16, and adopted one – a state-required "wholesale water supplier water conservation plan" – which includes a shift away from the city's previously approved goal of lowering its overall water usage to 140 gallons per capita per day by 2020. The goal is now bumped up to the less-ambitious 143 gallons by 2022. Leffingwell pointed out that the 140 goal was originally set by the state and said it's his understanding that the Texas Water Devel­op­ment Board is revising the goal to reflect two different benchmarks – one for residential and another for industrial. As things stand now, he said, Austin's big industrial water users tend to skew the numbers upward, making the 140 goal less realistic.

In any case, the plan won unanimous approval, despite environmentalists' concerns about the 140 goal going out the window. Council punted on the other items while directing utility staff to review a letter submitted by a handful of water-conservation activists who suggested technical amendments to a new drought contingency plan, and related revisions to the water conservation code. The drought plan won applause for increasing the lake level "trigger" for Stage 1 to 1.4 million acre-feet. At the same time, enviros urged that the Stage 2 trigger be raised to 1 million acre-feet of water storage (instead of 900,000), and that Stage 3 take effect when the lake levels drop to 700,000 acre-feet, rather than 600,000, as currently proposed.

In comments to council, several of the activists expressed dismay over the city's decision to lift the outdoor watering restrictions. "It sends a message to the public that things are okay, and things are obviously not okay," said water watchdog Paul Robbins.

Leffingwell reminded his colleagues, as he's done several times in the past, that the city has an ample water supply, thanks to a longterm water-rights contract the city signed with the LCRA in 1999. Only this time he added a use-it-or-lose-it twist: "There are a lot of cities that are very much interested in the water in the Colorado basin. Just to simplify that discussion, I would infer the following conclusion, and that is, we own this water, we paid for it in advance. We have the rights to it, but if we don't use it, I think we're pretty well assured that somebody else will."

*This story appeared in print and in an earlier online version with an incorrect date of a previous council discussion on Stage 2 drought restrictions. The meeting took place in May, not July.