Mayors want more help on water conservation

Friday, July 13, 2007 2:11 AM CDT

HED: Mayors want more help on water conservation

By David Steinkraus

Journal Times

Mayors of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River cities want a greater focus on water conservation, in particular a revolving loan fund to help upgrade municipal water systems to stop leaks.

The mayors made their request in the form of a resolution passed at the annual meeting of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Although the lakes are full of water, only 1 percent of the water is renewable; the rest has been here since the Ice Age, said David Miller, the mayor of Toronto and the initiative's outgoing chairman.

"We are all under pressure to reduce greenhouse gases generated by municipal operation. Water treatment and distribution is extremely energy-intensive," Miller said. "Consuming less water means consuming less energy, which means reducing greenhouse gases. And the silver lining is that municipalities save money through water conservation."

But cities facing aging infrastructures need help upgrading them, hence the need for the loan fund, he said.

So far, Miller said, 29 municipalities have joined the initiative's challenge of reducing water use by 15 percent over year 2000 use, to be accomplished by 2015. About half of those already have conservation plans running, he said, and those 11 cities have saved 58 billion gallons of water since 2000. Some cities have already met the goal, others haven't, said David Ullrich, the initiative's executive director.

"In Racine we haven't officially formalized doing this," said Racine Mayor Gary Becker, who is the incoming chairman of the initiative. Low-flow toilets are required and sanitary and storm sewers were separated decades ago, he said. "I don't want to discourage my fellow mayors, but we've actually had a utility that's been very aggressive for a very long time on a lot of these things."

In Wisconsin conservation has been emphasized for cities using wells, not the Great Lakes, said Keith Haas, general manager of the Racine Water and Wastewater Utility. This fall the utility will bring in a company to help detect leaks, he said. And while Racine is pumping less water than it used to, he said, the reason is because of the loss of water-using industries such as the Case foundry and Racine Steel Castings.

As to whether pumping less water will save money, that's harder to determine. Pumps have to run all the time to maintain water pressure so any savings would probably be negligible, Haas said.

The Public Service Commission recently hired its first water conservation coordinator to develop a plan for the state.

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