Mayor Villiaragosa unveils his water strategy plan; bloggers react
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 16, 2008 at 5:54 amFrom the Department of Water and Power, this press release:
Unveiling a plan to ensure water continues to flow in Los Angeles despite a worsening outlook, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa today laid out a long-term strategy for the City to meet an expected growth in water demand over the next 20 years with aggressive conservation and an unprecedented water recycling program. “LA’s future depends on our willingness to adopt an ethic of sustainability. If we don’t commit ourselves to conserving and recycling water, we will tap ourselves out,” said Mayor Villaraigosa. “This plan makes a basic promise to our kids: We are going to recycle and conserve enough water to meet 100% of new demand.”
By 2030, the population of Los Angeles is expected to jump by 500,000 people, according to the Southern California Association of Governments, pushing up water demand in the City by 100,000 acre-feet per year, or 15 percent.
The plan calls for the first real enforcement of City water restrictions since the early 1990s, dishing penalties to residents who water lawns during prohibited hours and restaurants that serve water to customers who have not requested it. On the technology side, the plan - “Securing LA’s Water Supply” - shifts the City’s focus from promoting efficient indoor plumbing to the outdoors, where Angeleno families use 30-40 percent of their water. Laying out a series of incentives for businesses and families to reduce water use, the plan introduces a new program to distribute free “smart sprinklers” to every home in Los Angeles.
Together, these steps to conserve water will balance out half of the expected 15 percent jump in water demand by 2030. The remaining 50 percent of water demand will be met by the City’s first wide-scale plan for water recycling.
Raising the amount of water it purifies for recycling by six-fold by 2019, LADWP will expand its existing “purple pipe” system (distributing water for irrigation and industrial uses) and will flesh out a “groundwater replenishment” water-recycling program.
“I salute Mayor Villaraigosa for his bold leadership in announcing the ‘Securing L.A.’s Water Supply,’” said David Nahai, LADWP CEO and General Manager. “This is a bold and visionary strategy for securing L.A.’s water supply today and in the future by developing a locally sustainable water supply.”
“We are already seeing the effects of global warming, and as a City we need a comprehensive plan to address rising temperatures and a shrinking water supply,” said Councilwoman Wendy Greuel. “I applaud the Mayor for proposing this bold strategy to ensure our children and grandchildren have an ample water supply. It’s incumbent upon all Angelenos to do their part or we will face severe long-term consequences.”
Read the full text of the press release from DWP by clicking here. Coverage from the New York Times by clicking here.
Blogger Ron Kaye, former editor of the LA Daily News, weighs in on his blog, Ron Kaye LA:
“L.A.’s future depends on our willingness to adopt an ethic of sustainability. If we don’t commit ourselves to conserving and recycling water, we will tap ourselves out,” Villaraigosa told the Daily News. “This plan makes a basic promise to our kids. We are going to recycle and conserve enough water to meet 100 percent of new demand.”
We’re going to drink toilet water for the kids’ sake? Aw. c’mon Antonio.
We’re going to drink water so some people can get rich. We’re going to drink toilet water because we put growth at any cost ahead of the quality of life. We’re going to drink toilet water because we don’t have the imagination or will to embrace regional water policies and conservation efforts
It’s like everything we do.
We don’t solve the traffic congestion problem by tougher regulations on trucks in peak hours, we put billions into the ground for subways that don’t take us where we want to go. We strip neighborhoods of a say on development so we can put up massive apartment complexes that encourage crime and poverty. We fix our schools buildings but not what goes on in the classroom. We build monuments to billionaires’ egos, not community centers for ordinary people to enjoy.
David over at Westchester Parents agrees, saying:
Today’s water conservation efforts have nothing to do with getting through a tough period of drought. It has everything to do with the current administrations efforts to build a staggering number of housing units and fill the city treasury.
Read the full text of Ron Kaye’s blog by clicking here, full text of Westchester Parents blog by clicking here.
Comments
2 Responses to “Mayor Villiaragosa unveils his water strategy plan; bloggers react”
Leave a Reply
As long as you have developer interests running politics, that is what you get. The funniest aspect of our last gubernatorial election in CA is that real estate investor Schwarzenegger, backed by developer A. Spanos was running against developer Phil Angelides backed by developer Angelo Tsakopoulos.
August 2007
Nearly every municipality in the region is recycling their human waste … many will reconsume their own effluent and/or mix it with their fresh water supplies including groundwater.
There is a great deal that the scientific community does not know with regard to the trace quantities of herbicides, pesticides, hormones, drugs, viruses and prions that will eventually show up due to system failures and gradual contamination.
Many people are aware that prions are probably not destroyed with current water treatment methods. They may be aware of mad cow disease, scapes, kuru, FFI, GSSS and CJD… all are prions. All known prion diseases, collectively called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), are untreatable and fatal !
Prions can be denatured by subjecting them to a temperatures of 134 degrees Celsius for 18 minutes in a pressurised steam autoclave.
Sometimes a scientific discovery shakes the confidence of scientists, making them question whether they truly understand nature’s “ground rules.”
No current regulations could be found, at least at the Federal level, that prohibit pathology laboratories or mortuaries from disposing of prion-contaminated tissue and fluids of CJ Disease patients into the sanitary sewer. It appears that currently, no validated analytical methodologies are available for the determination of prions in municipal municipal wastewater effluent.
CA struggles with solutions to its water shortage dilemmas…and at the same time refuses to risk one key stroke to communicate regarding a totally new fresh water Source that can be developed to yield a million acree feet each year for CA and not damage existing water rights or the environment.
WaterSource waterrdw@yahoo.com