Perhaps now Palo Alto, Los Altos and Mtn. View will monitor or turn off their over zealous water sprinklers along the El Camino median. Every morning pure, fresh drinking water is pouring onto the pavement.

Or how about some incentives to install gray water irrigation systems? Also many of the school and park lawns are irrigated to the point of muddiness. Who is in charge of that?!

85% of the state's water goes to agriculture, which produces 3% of the state's GDP. Most of this water is heavily subsidized in one way or another. Don't even bother asking about Jerry Brown's Delta tunnels.

We have a plumbing problem, not a water problem. It's Chinatown, Jake.

There is ample water available for outdoor use that is produced by the Palo Alto water treatment plant--if it could be transported back into the residential areas. It wouldn't be that hard (expensive) to pipe it across Highway 101 to the Greer Park area--but under-grounding it much farther would be a problem. It could be trucked around town, but that would prove expensive too, since the City costs out labor at over $110K/employee.

If the City were to take a long-term view of the matter, and say put away a couple hundred thousand dollars a year into a Reserve Fund to pay for running a pipe for recovered water from the baylands back to some point closer to where it is needed, this would eventually provide enough money to get the initial construction done.

Even if the water was only used by the City, and School District, this would save a lot of money, over time, on watering grass .. as well as reduce the aggregate demand for water from Hetch Hetchy.

Just curious about those permitted to have basements with the pipes draining out all the (groundwater? if that is the correct term).
I understood basements were not permitted in my neighborhood and now someone will in fact be building one (1st one one my street, to my knowledge).
I know we get Hetch Hetchy water here for our water service, but what is the effect of the Old Palo Alto and other residential homeowners who have those pipes draining basement water to the storm drains...?
Like an above post from Mr. Martin, with whom I typically agree, I wonder if something can be done to recycle or reuse groundwater -

@Resident - Agriculture is less than 3% of GDP these days, but that is a silly number to look at. Try looking at your dinner table instead. If you cut water to agriculture then food prices will skyrocket, and poorer families will be disproportionately affected. I'd rather cut off the water at golf courses..

@Basement Question
The City does not restrict basement construction for commercial/office or
residential projects, which might require dewatering of sites with the loss
of millions of gallons of water pumped into the storm drains and out to
the Bay. The dewatering is not allowed during the normal rainy season so as to not overload the storm drains. FEMA however does not allow basement construction in designated flood zones in the City.

I'm with Mr. Recycle. Reduce water to California's 1,236 golf courses (golflink). Per NPR, "Audubon International estimates that the average American course uses 312,000 gallons per day. In a place like Palm Springs, where 57 golf courses challenge the desert, each course eats up a million gallons a day. That is, each course each day in Palm Springs consumes as much water as an American family of four uses in four years."

They should start with using gray water,

@Mr Recycle,

You'll get no defense of golf courses from me. But yes, given I'm going to pay, then I'd rather pay it higher prices for food, than pay it in subsidies so guys who want to grow rice in the desert or flood irrigate can have water that's cheaper than it really costs.

Why are people ok with more and more government restraints on use of resources, but unable to talk about the underlying problem - too many people. Why do we acquiesce to water rationing, gas rationing and gas mileage standards, banning plastic bag use (all good for other reasons) but then refuse to admit that numbers of people are the problem? What good does it do to cut water use in half if the population in California will double in the next 25 years? Nothing is gained. We need to start dealing with the real problem here - again too many people - before we need four tunnels to drain the Delta and kill all the animals and plants in the process.

> If you cut water to agriculture then food prices will skyrocket,

California's Top Ten Crops--

Web Link

Milk — $6.9 billion
Grapes — $4.449 billion
Almonds — $4.347 billion
Nursery plants — $3.543 billion
Cattle, Calves — $3.299 billion
Strawberries — $1.939 billion
Lettuce — $1.448 billion
Walnuts — $1.349 billion
Hay — $1.237 billion
Tomatoes — $1.170 billion
---

Some years ago I remember reading an article about how water was used in California's agricultural sector. As I remember, the article claimed that about 85% of the water was used to produce about 15% of the Agricultural GDP. One example offered was the growing of rice somewhere in the northern counties. Rice is a heavy consumer of water, but not a large generator of funds.

The Agricultural Stat Review on the link provided (bottom left) is a good place to start looking at how much money each of the crops generates. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a ready correlation to water needed to bring each of these crops to market in this document.

Roughly 70% of our fresh water goes to agriculture, 10% domestic/municipal, 20% industry. Diet has a dramatic impact on water consumption. To produce 1 kg of grain requires approximately 1,500 litres of water while 1 kg of beef requires 15,000 litres.

Resident's right ...

>> 85% of the state's water goes to agriculture, which produces 3% of the state's GDP. Most of this water is heavily subsidized in one way or another. Don't even bother asking about Jerry Brown's Delta tunnels.

Very small changes in the agricultural practices can lead to large savings in water and infrastructure spending.

From what I see as I walk and drive around, no one seems to be taking water conservation very seriously, like the city , businesses or my neighbors for that matter.

Turning the bay into a mud hole and killing off the environment here is not really going to help anything in the long run. We all know it, but there is too much money in a system driven by money to be made.

All systems failing is the problem, just when we need them most and need people who can manage and evolve them.

I agree with Tina too .... we should implement the one child policy similar to what China has, but if you have more than the one child here you would just pay much more in taxes for whatever bracket you are in.

The problem thought with looking at the problem as too many people is that is just not much you can do about it. The only way is to begin to change things slowly so that they who have the kids make the choices to pay for the extra resources and services they use as well as their burden on the planet we all need to somehow find a way to manage.

How much water is used to grow alfalfa for rapidly-growing exports to China and Dubai? Water for this crop should pay urban market prices rather than agricultural prices. Easy to collect as an export tax.

Web Link

People who think population growth is the problem need to a) realize that global population growth is not only slowing down significantly due in large part to all the technology we and other tech areas have been putting out for decades & decades; and b) that California's own population growth has nothing to do with number of children per family, but rather the strong economy our technology-driven, beautiful state has.

To repeat, global population growth is slowing down, will continue to accelerate its slow-down, and CA's population growth is due to our strong economy, which in turn is due to population-growth-slowing technology. Get the conundrum?

There are as many articles on the population growth slowing trend as one could care to find, but here are a couple:

Web Link

Web Link

FYI to PA youth reading this - during the drought ~1990, we rented a water truck, filled it with free PA water treatment plant treated water, and charged PA, MP, Atherton & Los Altos homeowners a pretty penny to water their lawns/plants/trees. Someone ought to do this again!

The golf course in Palo Alto is no problem, they are bulldozing it! It uses recycled water. If everyone in California payed the same price for a gallon of water plus the deleviery cost our problems would be over.

It is a people problem. A given volume of water divided among fewer people means more water per person.

We should return to a traditional rainmaking method: human sacrifice. Right now probably have more than enough people to keep doing it for a decade or so.

I wonder how many of you have water thirsty lawns? How many companies have acres of them? That is where water should be turned off first.

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