L.A. prepares massive water-conservation plan
With vital and often-distant water sources shrinking, Los Angeles officials today will revive a controversial proposal to recycle wastewater as part of a plan to curb usage and move the city toward greater water independence.
The aggressive, multiyear proposal could do much to catch the city up to other Southern California communities that have launched advanced recycling programs.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s effort could cost up to $2 billion and affect a wide range of daily activities. For example, residents would be urged to change their clothes’ washers, and new restrictions would be placed on how and when they could water lawns and clean cars.
Financial incentives and building code changes would be used to incorporate high-tech conservation equipment in homes and businesses. Builders would be pushed to install waterless urinals, weather-sensitive sprinkler systems and porous parking lot paving that allows rain to percolate into groundwater supplies.
Los Angeles’ plan — a copy of which was made available to The Times — would invest in projects to capture and store rainfall and clean up a sprawling, contaminated water supply beneath the San Fernando Valley. About $1 billion would be allocated for reclamation, including a politically sensitive plan to use treated wastewater to recharge underground drinking supplies serving the Valley, Los Feliz and the Eastside.
A similar system was approved and built in the 1990s, then abandoned after critics labeled it a “toilet-to-tap” scheme.
Read the Rest of this article at laTimes.com
Contact the writer: rich.connell@latimes.com
Last 5 posts by charlotte
- No Water, No Development
- Sanders Viewpoint, June5
- May 22 Budget Hearing
- Salaries and Benefits and Public Safety
- A Cautionary Tale
To those who oppose any form of community sponsored development reduction/lot buyout plan – Technology is coming that will break the stranglehold that CCSD presently has on development in Cambria with its monopoly on the water and sewer systems. This article talks about one of them. Thanks Charlotte for posting it. You can kill desal if you want and think that will make the desire to build in Cambria go away, but it won’t. All it does is make a home in Cambria even more valuable, and that only strengthens the desire to build. Application of these new technologies will be expensive to be sure, maybe even more expensive than desal. But when the typical home in Cambria approaches $1 million, it makes economic sense to do it. The problem you’re faced with is that when these technologies get approved for Cambria, CCSD gets cut out of the loop on growth management. When that happens, there’s no more power to enforce a growth cap. That’s when you’ll be faced with either allowing all the rest of the lots to be built out, or start buying them. So the best thing to do if you’re really interested in keeping Cambria small would be to support CCSD’s efforts to expand the water system in a limited quantity, start negotiating buyback of lots, lift the moratorium and go back to managed growth, thereby removing the incentive to bring in these new technologies.