Raleigh water conservation specialist offers drought insights

This evening I attended the monthly meeting of my local Citizens Advisory Council (I live in the East Raleigh CAC) where the featured speaker was Ed Buchan, water conservation specialist with Raleigh's Public Utilities Department. Buchan gave an informative overview of the city's drinking water system and how it's been impacted by the ongoing drought, which he described as being "of biblical proportions."

I'm not going to recount the entire presentation here, but I'll highlight some particularly interesting points that came up:

* Raleigh has a built-in conflict of interest when it comes to promoting water conservation. The maintenance and expansion of the city's water system is paid for through an enterprise fund that's separate from the regular budget -- and financed by selling water. That means if the city is successful in encouraging residents to conserve, it stands to face a revenue shortfall. "It's a challenge for a system like ours to go into conservation mode," Buchan said.

* Buchan said Raleigh's current mandatory conservation ordinance "doesn't have a lot of teeth" when it comes to large water users -- that is, industrial customers like Pepsico and Ajinomoto. The only way they could cut water use significantly would be to cut production, which would "go over like a lead balloon," he said. Meanwhile, Raleigh has shut down car washes that failed to recycle water -- about half of all car washes in the city -- but that has "hardly affected peak demand," Buchan reported.

* Unlike Charlotte, Raleigh still has not moved to a tiered-rate billing system, in which customers who use more water pay more. One reason, said Buchan, is that financiers like the certainty of a flat rate and get nervous when cities impose tiered structures, which could affect the city's bond rating.

* Another reason Raleigh hasn't moved to a tiered-rate structure is because its billing system simply can't handle it. When asked who the Charlotte-based contractor was who handled billing for the city (as you may have noticed, we mail our water payments to the "City of Raleigh" in "Charlotte, N.C"), Buchan couldn't say. I don't know, either. If someone out there does, please send an e-mail to sue at raleigheconews.com dot com, or leave a comment here. Thanks.

* Buchan takes a dim view of programs providing low-cost or free gadgets to encourage water conservation. Incentives, he said, have "never worked," though he considers rebates a better alternative. However, the city recently acquired 5,000 faucet aerators and 5,000 low-flow shower heads, and it's now figuring out how to distribute them. This will probably be done through the Community Services department. Buchan noted that the city of Boston sent staff door to door to change out wasteful shower heads, but he said Raleigh lacked the capacity to do that.

* One of the city's biggest water customers is Pepsico, which bottles Falls Lake water that it purchases at the same rate as residential customers and sells at a dramatic markup: While a gallon of Falls Lake water costs $.0022, Pepsi sells its Aquafina product at more than $4 per gallon -- one of the reasons Durham City Councilman Eugene Brown has called for a boycott of Pepsi products. But at the same time, the city can't release information to the public about Pepsico's water usage without opening itself to litigation. For more details, read this Independent Weekly article by N.C. State professor Cat Warren:

Raleigh, meanwhile, refuses to reveal exactly what amount Pepsi or their other largest users are pulling out of the municipal system—citing an exemption in the public records law. "The records you requested are enterprise billing records and not available to the public," wrote Raleigh City Attorney Thomas McCormick.

This is what it means to be in the water business: the conflict of interest between the notion of water as a public trust, and water as an enterprise, income for the city's wallet. Notes North Carolina Press Association General Counsel Amanda Martin: "We are in the middle of an extreme drought, and we are not even entitled to know which users are consuming inordinate amounts of water. It's a travesty, if you ask me, but unfortunately it is the law."

The scheduled guest for Raleigh East's March CAC meeting is Mayor Charles Meeker. I expect we'll have an interesting discussion.