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For decades, we’ve heard that a reckoning was coming.
Climate change would threaten our fundamental way of life in the West. After years of neglect, essential parts of our infrastructure would fail. The bills for the costs of maintaining our essential services — kicked willy-nilly down the road to a murky unidentified date in the future — would come due.
We ignored it all, blithely turning up the air conditioning, watering our lawns and tuning out the scientists, the engineers, the city managers.
Now that reckoning has arrived.
If you don’t believe me, just ask the folks in Westminster. They can tell you all about the connections between climate change, infrastructure and money.
The first signs of reckoning there came in 2018.
Officials from Westminster’s water and sewer departments began warning that the 50-year-old facilities were worn out.
The storage tanks for the city’s water, the pipes and pumps delivering it, and the sewage treatment systems were shot. Concrete was flaking away, pipes deteriorating, pumps becoming unreliable.
The city council looked at the mountain of evidence and made the only responsible choice: it voted to upgrade the system.
To pay for it, the council also voted to raise the rates for water and sewer customers and, since the cost of the projects was estimated in the tens of millions, the increased fees were significant, especially for high users.
When the summer of 2020 came and the thermometer hit 90 or above for a record-setting 75 days, the good folks of Westminster sprinkled their lawns like they always had (maybe not blithely but still …) and the resulting water bills blew their minds.
Still in deep denial of reality, a group of Westminster activists mobilized as Water Warriors to recall several city council members for their failure to kick the problems down the road once more...
Several Westminster council members will face re-election in November and surely water rates will be an issue. Those who routinely flood their lawns with 20,000 gallons or more each month and pay the highest rates are not about to give up the fight for their right to Kentucky Bluegrass — drought and system failures be damned.
People are STILL moving to Colorado and trying to make their little piece of "Rocky Mountain High" look just like back home - where they get plenty of water for free just falling from the sky and the bluegrass grows as high as an elephant's eye.
People, people, people. If you have moved here from some place else, you need to understand that you are now living in what some refer to as the "Great American Desert." And you need to understand that the Western US is going through a period of severe drought. Notice that haze that has become a common feature of Colorado skies every summer? That haze never used to appear almost everyday the way it does now. Now, the West is experiencing an increase in temperatures and a decrease in precipitation due to climate change and this directly contributes to both the intensity and the number of wildfires. The wildfire season in the West is now 78 days longer than it was in the 1970s.
Water in Colorado and the rest of the West is finite. You cannot magically re-create the Garden of Eden in your backyard by firing your elected officials. Get rid of every last Colorado state government official from the governor on down, and the water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell will still continue to fall.
Those who feel so strongly about their lawns should perhaps consider moving back to Kentucky.
I wholeheartedly agree that thirsty lawns are a big waste in this part of the world, but it should be noted that agriculture accounts for ~90% of the state’s water usage.
I suspect that many older jurisdictions have these same problems of aging infrastructure.
Not sure if the infrastructure bills working in Congress will bring any relief; I prefer the funding for repairs and replacements be done at the local level via the rate structure.
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I wholeheartedly agree that thirsty lawns are a big waste in this part of the world, but it should be noted that agriculture accounts for ~90% of the state’s water usage.
Yep, agriculture currently uses a very high share of Colorado's water. And let's face it, a great many of Colorado's farmers and ranchers are growing water thirsty crops like alfalfa and hay which then go to feeding livestock. This process is as wasteful as attempting to turn the Front Range as emerald green as Ireland.
Various government subsidies and the frenzied efforts of the Bureau of Reclamation over the last hundred years or so have encouraged farmers to grow alfalfa rather than more sustainable dryland crops like pinto beans. The bill is now coming due for our attempts to turn the desert into a garden. Population increase and the impacts of climate change are dealing the final blows to what was always an untenable situation.
I happen to live on a family ranch and it breaks my heart to see what those folks are going through. But damn they're tough. They are descendants of the original pioneers who settled this area, and they're not giving up without a fight. I have to admit that my sympathies go out to them and the other Colorado ranchers and farmers like them rather than to the bluegrass contingent living in the major urban areas.
“ Climate change would threaten our fundamental way of life in the West. After years of neglect, essential parts of our infrastructure would fail.”
Conflating 2 different aspects.
Stupid comment.
People are STILL moving to Colorado and trying to make their little piece of "Rocky Mountain High" look just like back home - where they get plenty of water for free just falling from the sky and the bluegrass grows as high as an elephant's eye.
People, people, people. If you have moved here from some place else, you need to understand that you are now living in what some refer to as the "Great American Desert." And you need to understand that the Western US is going through a period of severe drought. Notice that haze that has become a common feature of Colorado skies every summer? That haze never used to appear almost everyday the way it does now. Now, the West is experiencing an increase in temperatures and a decrease in precipitation due to climate change and this directly contributes to both the intensity and the number of wildfires. The wildfire season in the West is now 78 days longer than it was in the 1970s.
Water in Colorado and the rest of the West is finite. You cannot magically re-create the Garden of Eden in your backyard by firing your elected officials. Get rid of every last Colorado state government official from the governor on down, and the water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell will still continue to fall.
Those who feel so strongly about their lawns should perhaps consider moving back to Kentucky.
There are a lot of examples of water bills in the comments and they generally run around 4 to 8 times higher in the summer than the winter. Yes the rates seem high compared to most Front Range cities but to me a precious resource should be priced appropriately. And if people are using 4-8 times the water in the summer than in the winter you can surmise that extra amount is going to outdoor irrigation (or some people take a heck of a lot more showers in the summer). That said, one thing that would at least allow people to use less would be a city ban on HOAs requiring lawns to be watered (people already have the legal right to xeriscape with plants under state law and they should have done it 20 years ago, but I can acknowledge that it’s doesn’t cost anything to turn the water off compared to retrofitting a yard). Remove that requirement and anyone who waters enough to rack up these large bills in the summer is clearly choosing a green lawn over a reasonable water bill.
Kudos to those on the Westminster city council who are willing to risk their political careers for this.
Some people talk about spending $500 a month on water in the summer and $50-70 per month in the winter. If you read between the lines and compare those figures you can surmise that these people are using incredible amounts of extra water in the summer months and I doubt it’s all going to extra showers (LOL). That said, one thing that would at least allow people to use less would be a city ban on HOAs requiring lawns to be watered (people already have the legal right to xeriscape with plants under state law and they should have done it 20 years ago, but I can acknowledge that it’s doesn’t cost anything to turn the water off compared to retrofitting a yard). Remove that requirement and anyone who waters enough to rack up a bill that high is clearly choosing a green lawn over a reasonable water bill.
I agree that it takes a serious sense of entitlement to demand that your city provide cheap drinking water to dump on lawns while refusing to provide the revenue to upgrade/replace an aging water delivery system. Kudos to those on the Westminster city council who are willing to risk their political careers for this.
Thanks for your post! I liked the one comment on the survey from the guy from Florida who complained that the water bill there was only $35/month for a household of five, but here he is paying $500.00. Well, duh. Ever notice that now you are living in a place with a climate the complete opposite of that of Florida?
Xeriscaping is a great solution but many are put off by the high start-up price. Yes, it's costly to dig up all that bluegrass and then buy the drought tolerant plants to replace it. Plus, you still have to do quite a bit of watering for the first couple of years or so to allow the plants to get established and develop good root systems. But after that the plants need much less water and you can get a real savings on your water bill. I wish more people would take the leap and plant sagebrush and chamisa in their yards (just kidding about the sagebrush ).
Yep, agriculture currently uses a very high share of Colorado's water. And let's face it, a great many of Colorado's farmers and ranchers are growing water thirsty crops like alfalfa and hay which then go to feeding livestock. This process is as wasteful as attempting to turn the Front Range as emerald green as Ireland.
Various government subsidies and the frenzied efforts of the Bureau of Reclamation over the last hundred years or so have encouraged farmers to grow alfalfa rather than more sustainable dryland crops like pinto beans. The bill is now coming due for our attempts to turn the desert into a garden. Population increase and the impacts of climate change are dealing the final blows to what was always an untenable situation.
I happen to live on a family ranch and it breaks my heart to see what those folks are going through. But damn they're tough. They are descendants of the original pioneers who settled this area, and they're not giving up without a fight. I have to admit that my sympathies go out to them and the other Colorado ranchers and farmers like them rather than to the bluegrass contingent living in the major urban areas.
If I were king of America, the whole upper Colorado River basin would be depopulated and re-wilded. People fighting to maintain unsustainable luxury get no sympathy from me, whether it’s the hundreds of thousands of households on sprinkling ~5% of the state’s total water usage on unused Victorian lawns/status symbols or ranchers draining entire reservoirs to produce the most wasteful food in existence in a desert that was already abandoned once by a much more conscious civilization due to drought.
Unfortunately, the last decade of social media has shown that human bandwidth for sympathy and respect is indeed finite. I reserve my grief for the billions of us who will literally or effectively be lifelong refugees of a crisis caused by mid-20th Century humans who used up the finite world and hoped an Abrahamic god and/or profiteers would pick up their shirking of civic duty.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davebarnes
“ Climate change would threaten our fundamental way of life in the West. After years of neglect, essential parts of our infrastructure would fail.”
Conflating 2 different aspects.
Stupid comment.
I believe the point of the article is that those two thesis statements, which are usually kept discrete, are actually two sides of the same coin. The two issues are rearing their heads simultaneously because they have the same root cause: decades of voters’ pathological narcissism. The point could have been made more eloquently though.
There are a lot of examples of water bills in the comments and they generally run around 4 to 8 times higher in the summer than the winter. Yes the rates seem high compared to most Front Range cities but to me a precious resource should be priced appropriately. And if people are using 4-8 times the water in the summer than in the winter you can surmise that extra amount is going to outdoor irrigation (or some people take a heck of a lot more showers in the summer). That said, one thing that would at least allow people to use less would be a city ban on HOAs requiring lawns to be watered (people already have the legal right to xeriscape with plants under state law and they should have done it 20 years ago, but I can acknowledge that it’s doesn’t cost anything to turn the water off compared to retrofitting a yard). Remove that requirement and anyone who waters enough to rack up these large bills in the summer is clearly choosing a green lawn over a reasonable water bill.
Kudos to those on the Westminster city council who are willing to risk their political careers for this.
This is already a statewide law as of 2019. HOAs can’t prohibit xeriscaping.
This is already a statewide law as of 2019. HOAs can’t prohibit xeriscaping.
That’s true, but if people keep their lawns, HOAs can still require them to water to maintain a certain level of green. I brought this up because some of the Westminster residents were complaining that they have no choice in watering because of their HOAs. My neighborhood has no HOA and many people don’t water in the summer. I removed all of that evil weed (Kentucky bluegrass) a long time ago but if others want to just let it go dormant that works for me - I call it “poor man’s xeriscaping.”
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