Colin Clark's blog

• Login or register to post comments
• Read more

I’d mentioned previously that “Peak water use is what drives the supposed need for Water Treatment Plant 4,” and that modest conservation efforts could reduce water use on those few hottest days of summer when when we use - and waste - the most water.

In times of extreme drought (like last summer) the City's rules call for once-per-week watering instead of twice-per-week. However, that schedule still had half of all residences watering on the same one day per week (and half of all businesses and apartments).

Peak summer water use could be further reduced by splitting a once-per-week watering schedule so that roughly one quarter of homes would be watering on any given day, instead of half of the homes. For example, houses with even addresses north of the Colorado River could water on Sunday, while even numbered houses south of the river could water on on Thursdays. Odd numbered houses north could water on Saturday, south could water on Wednesday. Same for businesses and apartments.

It is not only possible, it’s extremely inexpensive to reduce our daily summer water use to below 200 million gallons per day or MGD, which would be 85 MGD’s below our current treatment capacity of 285 MGD. If our most intense days of water use result in a cushion of capacity that almost doubles what Water Treatment Plant 4 would provide, how does it make sense to commit $1.2 BILLION to the Mistake on the Lake?

• Read more

Why I Am Fired Up About Water Sustainability, and Why You Should Be Too!

In an age of online activism, we should jump at opportunities to be physically present with like-minded people and in the presence of locally elected decision-makers who need to hear from us.

Thursday, March 11th, is one such opportunity for Austinites and Central Texans to come together and rally for water stewardship and sustainability, not spending $1.2 billion on a new water treatment plant so a few people can over-water their lawns in the hot summer.

Come to our Rally for Water Sustainability on March 11th from 4-7pm at Austin City Hall. You can RSVP on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=487339750345&ref=mf

We can speak out FOR draft recommendations of the Water Conservation Task Force that call for reducing water use about 2% per year for the next ten years.

We can speak out FOR watering our lawns no more than once a week in the summer.

We can speak out FOR saving rate-payers $1.2 BILLION in projected costs (including interest payments on borrowed money) by putting the proposed water treatment plant on the shelf while the City updates the 30-year old Comprehensive Plan. (Shouldn’t our long-range plan have some impact on infrastructure decisions that will cost rate-payers over a billion dollars?)

We can speak out FOR saving the endangered Jollyville Plateau salamander, whose prime habitat (springs along Bull Creek) could be drained dry by the water treatment plant’s transmission mains and massive tunnels through thousands of feet of karst Edwards Aquifer and Glen Rose limestone.

If we don’t speak up, and soon, a one-vote majority will sink Austin into decades of debt to pay back money used to build a water treatment plant that we don’t need. Water rates will keep going up (they raised single family rates 10.1% last year).

• Login or register to post comments
• Read more

Water is essential for human life.

We can live without a lot of things, but we can’t live more than a few days without water. We can live without cars. We can live without electricity. And for most of human history we have lived without cars and electricity, but we have never lived without water. Climate predictions for Central Texas indicate more heat and less rain, which means less water flowing into the Colorado River, the Edwards Aquifer, and all of their contributing watersheds.

• Login or register to post comments
• Read more

The Austin Water Utility is asking the Austin City Council to fund construction of a new $423 million water treatment plant on Lake Travis, known as Water Treatment Plant 4. (Austin had three treatment plants but decommissioned the Green plant on Lady Bird Lake just last year, but the name remains for this enormously expensive, and entirely unnecessary infrastructure.)

• 2 comments
• Read more