02 Jul Summer Water Use Down – Will City Council Come Back to Reality?

As a slim 4-3 majority of Austin City Council Members continue to fund the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake (aka Water Treatment Plant 4), water use this summer continues to drop. Reduced water use means reduced revenue for the Austin Water Utility, which is already $43 million below projected revenue for 2010.

While temperatures this June were not like last year’s blistering string of triple digit highs, there were 25 days in June with zero rainfall.

Despite the lack of consistent rain and despite the Water Utility’s apparent refusal to promote water conservation to the public when it is needed most (in the summer), Austinites used a lot less water than the Water Utility would like.

So far this summer, the most water we’ve used in one day is 170 million gallons. For perspective, we have the capacity to treat 285 million gallons in one day. When it rained heavily this week, water use dropped to 113 million gallons per day.

This data is relevant for two big reasons. First, the water utility still claims that the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake must be in operation to meet projected demand for water in the summer of 2014. Any reading of summer water use from the last two extremely hot and dry summers shows that their projection is wildly off base. We would have to start deliberately wasting water to even come close to needing the additional water treatment that the Mistake on the Lake would provide.

Second, lower water use screws up the water utility’s finances. As the utility asks City Council (and Austin rate-payers) to take on $400 million in debt to pay for the Mistake on the Lake (which balloons to $1.2 billion with interest), lower water sales mean that the utility must raise water rates even more to make debt payments, meet payroll and operation expenses, and kick back money to the City’s general fund. The term “death spiral” comes to mind.

Maybe now it becomes obvious why the water utility is not aggressively promoting the new watering schedule – the less water Austinites use the less money the utility collects.

Thankfully, three City Council Members are standing up for conservation of water and preservation of water rates – Laura Morrison, Bill Spelman, and Chris Riley – by consistently voting against funding for the Mistake on the Lake.

Mayor Lee Leffingwell is the most vocal supporter of the Billion Dollar Mistake on the Lake, which means that Leffingwell, instead of focusing on affordable city services, is supporting a massive water rate increase to pay for an unnecessary boondoggle.

Leffingwell and Council Members Randi Shade, Mike Martinez, and Sheryl Cole also support risking the extinction of a rare and unique local species (the Jollyville Plateau salamander) with a mining operation to build tunnels under the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve to ship water from the Mistake on the Lake to the city’s distribution system. The 8 miles of tunnels ten to twelve feet in diameter could drain the karst limestone of the Bull Creek watershed and dry up springs that are essential to the salamanders’ survival.

Apparently for the Water Treatment Plant Four (Leffingwell, Shade, Martinez, and Cole), making contractors and engineers rich (or richer) is more important than protecting Austin rate-payers and endangered species.