CENTERVILLE—All of Weber Basin Water Conservation District’s reservoirs are full and the supply looks good this year, General Manager Scott Paxton and Assistant General Manager Jon Parry told the Centerville City Council on June 3.
“We have two years of storage, two years long, which is awesome when you have that feeling,” Paxton said. “And we have that feeling this year: all of our reservoirs are full.”
Weber Basin serves 700,000 residents across five counties, which it has done successfully for many years, but the district has only 10,000 acre-feet left of unallocated water even though growth in several communities in Davis County is exploding and they are desperate for water, Paxton said.
Water from the Bear River project which was expected to be available by 2030 now seems unlikely with the challenges the Great Salt Lake is facing and other environmental issues, he said.
“The environment that we’re operating in right now is such that they’re not allowing serious consideration of anything that would aggravate the situation of the Great Salt Lake,” Parry said later in the meeting. “So any project that would have an increase in depletion associated with the use of the water is going to be something that I think is going to be a no-go right now.”
To help them meet the need, Weber Basin is encouraging all the communities it serves to implement water conservation measures, he said.
“We have a very limited supply left, and we’re counting on conservation to be one of those major supplies,” Paxton said.
Although the two men made several suggestions, the district is leaving it up to the individual communities what conservation programs to initiate, he said.
“Our mission statement is to ensure adequate water supply for the entirety of our service area,” Paxton said. “So, we’re not digging into the granular nature of what Centerville’s portfolio looks like, or Bountiful’s. We have a general understanding of what they do, but we’re looking at the region and saying, in order to accomplish the goals of the region, what do we need to do to ensure we’ve got sustainable water use?”
Paxton particularly encouraged the city council to address outdoor watering. Water district officials are not worried about indoor use although he still encouraged water users to follow such practices as not running water while brushing their teeth.
“Eighty percent of the water that we put out on our landscape is lost to the environment through evapotranspiration from our plants, or deep, deep percolation to the shallow groundwater, or other ways,” Paxton said. “We’re concerned with all outdoor use, because 65 to 70 percent of the water we use, generally in our developments, in our residential use is outdoor. Whether it's culinary or secondary, that's a huge amount of water that escapes. So that’s why we’ve really pushed conservation.”
Paxton asked city officials to encourage developers to utilize water-thrifty grasses rather than Kentucky Bluegrass which requires large volumes of watering to thrive in the Utah climate. When homeowners replace their grass, if they did so with Bucha or other grasses the water savings could be significant, he said.
“It’s just getting the people’s mindset turned around, just a total mindset change of how they use their watering, how they use their outdoor water and whether they’re actually replacing the sod or not there, they should always be thinking about it, and especially now that we’ve got meters,” he said.
Employing these practices could bring water use close to the district’s stated goal of 175 gallons per capita per day for new growth.
“What we’re saying is we need the new growth to be at that 175 ish, and we need to start as early as we can, because we don’t want to be buying turf from somebody that just put in their lawn; it just doesn’t make any sense,” Paxton said. “And then we incentivize the existing population to change their landscape as they’re willing to do. We’re not going to be forcing anybody to change their landscape.”
Another way Centerville could help would be to require that no more than 35 percent of the front and side yards of single-family homes be turf grass and to give explicit guidance on the type of plants and where rocks can be used, Parry told the council.
“When you’re adopting ordinances, take into consideration plant coverage,” he said. “If you’re silent on the matter, you’re going to have people just putting rock everywhere, and that’s not what we’re necessarily promoting, but we’re also going to default to what the communities want to see going on.”
At the end of the presentation, Mayor Clark Wilkinson thanked the men and the conservation district for their efforts.
“We appreciate what you’re doing in that area because people just take it for granted that it’s flowing in,” he said. “Without water, we don’t live. I mean, that is the number one. And you guys are in such an important area. So, when you beat your head against walls sometimes you get tired, please don’t. Keep that water flowing.”
