LeakBird

(May 12, 2009, The Charlotte Observer)
City Manager Curt Walton recommended a $1.87 billion budget Monday that includes an increase in water rates but not property taxes.
Water users will see $2.37 a month added to the average $45.92 water bill – a 5.2 percent increase.
Walton’s proposed budget puts more money toward street resurfacing, but freezes [...]

(May 1, 2009, The Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The rates approved in 2008 increased bills by 27.5 percent the first year, 12.5 percent the second, 12.5 percent the third and 12 percent the fourth. Franklin said Atlanta’s rates already are higher than other major cities.
Auditors suggested the later hikes might be reduced by as much as 2 [...]

(April 29, 2009, The Daily News)
Bronx residents who managed to take time off from work for the afternoon public hearing voiced their opposition to a proposed 14% hike in water rates.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Evelyn Rodriguez, 57. “Don’t we pay enough for everything else? Everything goes up, and now they’re raising our water.”
If the measure is [...]

(April 20, 2009, The Mercury News)

Water users in Antioch will be asked to cut their consumption by 15 percent this summer.
The mandatory reduction comes because the Contra Costa Water District, from which Antioch purchases some of its water, has notified its customers of a decrease in available water this year, according to a city news [...]

(April 13, 2009, The Winston-Salem Journal)
North Carolina considers itself the most progressive of the Southern states, so it is shocking to learn that we’re so far behind everyone else in the region when it comes to managing water. Clodfelter’s bill is modeled on Georgia’s law. The rest of the southeastern states have management systems, too.
(Original [...]

(April 10, 2009, The San Diego Tribune)
Water and sewer rates may soon be going up in Del Mar.
The Del Mar City Council voted unanimously Monday to approve higher rates for the next five years and set an appeal hearing for May 26 for anyone who opposes the increase. The time of the hearing has not [...]

(April 9, 2009, AFP)
Some two million residents of Mexico City on Thursday began 36 hours without water under an emergency plan over Easter vacation to respond to a record drop in water supply and to work on repairs…
(Original Article Here)

(April 9, 2009, The Miami Herald)
Everglades marshes and Big Cypress swamps are drying up. Estuaries at the mouths of the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers are turning too salty. Lake Okeechobee, brimming from Tropical Storm Fay less than a year ago, is slipping into the low zone again.
If smoke wafting from Palmetto Bay brush fires [...]

(April 5, 2009, The Atlanta Journal Constitution)

Two years ago, while metro Atlanta’s drought burned through the record book, Karin Guzy of east Cobb turned off her in-ground sprinkler system.
It hasn’t been on since.
Instead, she waters her garden from two 250-gallon water cisterns. The large buckets easily fill from light rain collected off her roof.
Guzy doesn’t [...]

(March 22, 2009, GreenCarCongress)
Xinhua. North China’s Hebei Province, the major water supplier to Beijing, has over-extracted its groundwater, causing major subsidence according to a water conservancy official.
“Water shortage has become a big problem facing the province’s social and economic development,” Li Qinglin, director of Hebei’s water conservancy department, told a forum marking the 17th World [...]

(March 20, 2009, The Mercury News)

The pain of a full-blown summer drought came closer to reality Friday when the staff of Silicon Valley’s main water supplier recommended a 15 percent mandatory cutback.
If the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District — which is the wholesale supplier of drinking water for 1.8 million people from [...]

David Zetland of Aguanomics and Professor Robert Stavins, Director of the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard, were “on the same page“ with regard to water conservation pricing after Professor Stavins wrote a recent op-ed for the Huffington Post.  Until Stavins took a slightly different tack on two water pricing misconceptions.
In his first piece, Professor Stavins [...]

(March 5, 2009, AZStarNet)
Customers of the Marana water utility will begin paying more for their water on March 27.

The Town Council on Feb. 24 approved an 8 percent increase in rates for the Marana Water Department, which serves about 5,000 customers.

It is the first water-rate increase for the town in more than 10 years, said [...]

(March 9, 2009, DelwareOnline)
Newark City Council is expected to raise its water rates 20 percent today, after backing off a controversial plan to increase rates for out-of-town customers by 30 percent.
Council members, facing criticism from area lawmakers and a crowd of about 100 at their last meeting, agreed to a 20 percent, across-the-board increase. Instead [...]

(March 4, 2009, The Associated Press)
Authorities say a North Dakota man who clashed with a city official over an unpaid water bill got into an 8 1/2-hour standoff with deputies that ended with a SWAT team member shooting him in the shoulder.
Morton County Sheriff Dave Shipman said George Fischer threatened the Hebron (HEEB’-run) city auditor [...]

(March 4, 2009, The Times West Virginian)
The West Virginia Public Service Commission has agreed to hear an appeal in the Fairmont water-rate increase case.
A municipal appeal case was opened because the Valley Falls Public Service District and the City of Mannington protested the water rate increase, said Sarah Robertson, a spokesperson for the PSC.
The issue [...]

(March 4, 2009, The Mercury News)

It has been nearly a week since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped the bomb, laying out a doomsday drought scenario so starkly apocalyptic he sounded like Dr. Strangelove. And yet, Justina Pillado endured weather Tuesday in the teeth of the governor’s state of emergency that made her toes curl.
“This rain sucks,” [...]

Yesterday I was talking to a San Francisco plumber named Jim.
“You know the real reason water rates are going up?” he asked me.
“Because the water utilities’ revenues are down in these troubled times,” I replied.
“Yes, but it’s actually deeper than that,” he said.  “We’ve gotten more water efficient.  We’re not using as much water.”
“I find [...]

(March 2, 2009, The Houston Chronicle)

Water bills in Houston are poised to go up about $2.26 a month for an average homeowner under a plan City Council is expected to begin weighing today.
Under procedures put in place after 2004 – when water bills went up as high as 10 percent for many residents – rates [...]

Acoustic water leak detection has been around a long time. It predominates in the water industry when it comes to listening for leaks in underground pipes, in order to protect and secure municipal water supplies from catastrophic underground leaks.  A couple of companies that come to mind are SubSurface Leak Detection, Inc, Davis-Inotek Instruments and [...]

(March 2, 2009, John Laumer, Treehugger)
The Las Vegas Review-Journal cites the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority saying ‘now may be the time to take a serious look at a decades-old idea of capturing floodwater from the Mississippi River and using it to recharge the massive groundwater aquifer beneath the Central Plains.’
Was She [...]

(March 2, 2009, The Richmond Daily News)
Richmond’s water and sewer line systems are old, worn down and some think expensive.
Richmond Third Ward Candidate Terrie Lee Stanley addressed the Richmond City Council on Wednesday night to make a plea on behalf of residents.
Stanley said she had been contacted by 13 residents just in one day about [...]

(March 1, 2009, The Chicago Times)
State officials are drafting plans to spend nearly $122 million in federal stimulus money to clean up Indiana’s aging, overflow-prone sewers and upgrade its drinking water systems.
Although federal agencies are still fine-tuning details of how the nation’s $787 billion stimulus package can be spent, Friday was the first deadline for [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, Reuters)
“The south has plenty of water and the north lacks it, so if possible why not borrow some?” China’s revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong said in 1952.
That probably seemed a great idea at the time.
But it is causing pollution as well as discontent among farmers facing forced resettlement to make way for a mammoth construction to [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, The OCRegister)
Even as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide water emergency Friday, Orange County agencies were pushing ahead with tough new restrictions on water use amid growing worries about drought-driven cuts in water supply.
Despite recent rains, the state is in its third year of drought, a statement from the Governor’s Office said. [...]

(Feb. 28, 2009, Aguanomics)
Aquadoc’s review of Blue Gold attracted an interesting comment:
—————-
Mike, I am compelled to answer your hypothetical question of Maude Barlow: “why is privatization of our water so bad?”
While designing and constructing water delivery sources by experts make sense, the delivery of water is not a highly specialized technology and therefore is quite [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, Reuters)
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state emergency due to drought and said he would consider mandatory water rationing in the face of nearly $3 billion in economic losses from below-normal rainfall this year.
As many as 95,000 agricultural jobs will be lost, communities will be devastated and some growers in [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, Ceres)
Global climate change is exacerbating water scarcity problems around the world, yet few businesses and investors are paying attention to this growing financial threat, according to a report issued today by Ceres and the Pacific Institute.
Water is crucial for the global economy – driving every industry from agriculture to electric power to [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, The Mercury News)

In March, after a series of cold winter storms, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was above normal. That seemed to be good news for California’s water supply, which relies heavily on Sierra Nevada snow.
But after a record heat wave in the early spring, it was as if the winter’s [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, The Los Angeles Times)
With California’s budget crisis resolved for the moment, state lawmakers Thursday turned their attention to another emergency: a three-year drought that has left key reservoirs at 35% of capacity.
Legislators stepped forward with plans to ask voters to borrow as much as $15 billion for projects to expand and improve [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, Bloomberg News)
On a cloudless December day in the Nevada desert, workers in white hard hats descend into a 30- foot-wide shaft next to Lake Mead.
As they’ve been doing since June, they’ll blast and dig straight down into the limestone surrounding the reservoir that supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water. In September, [...]

(Feb. 25, 2009, West Volusia Beacon)
Imagine 15 or 30 years from now, turning on your kitchen faucet. A few drops dribble into the sink, then the water stops. It’s gone.
That’s what could happen without a large-scale plan to supply water to Central Floridians, DeLand Public Services Director Keith Riger said.
A couple of years ago, the [...]

(Feb. 24, 2009, MSNBC)
Water and sewer customers can expect to see higher rates in March.
City commissioners adopted a new rate structure that could raise the average customer’s bill $5.46 a month.
Customers who live outside the city limits will be charged 25 percent higher rates, meter fees, deposits and connection fees.
City Manager Billy Poe said the [...]

(Feb. 24, 2009, The San Diego Union Tribune)
The punishing drought that threatens to disrupt California’s economy could also exact a heavy toll on the environment, from the Anza-Borrego Desert to the mountains casting shadows on Lake Tahoe.
Water managers are bracing to get by with just a trickle of the normal deliveries from state and [...]

Chris Brown wrote a post on the economics of water for the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, in which he argues that water shortages wouldn’t exist in a free market. To put it another way, with government intervention, water shortages are virtually guaranteed.  I happen to agree with Mr. Brown, however, it’s easier to acknowledge what [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, On The Scene, Fox News)

In case you didn’t know, the Southeastern United States has been in a drought for the last several years.  The City of Atlanta was in danger of losing their water supply and many small towns in Tennessee simply ran out.  To keep the Southeast from going completely dry, [...]

(Feb. 24, 2009, Coloradoan)
Plans to ramp up water conservation efforts in Fort Collins include a couple of tried-and-true methods – education and financial incentives.
Putting those plans to work would likely mean higher rates for water customers even as average per capita demand for water decreases, officials say.
Using less water has broad impacts, including prolonging the [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, The Ludwig Von Mises Institute)
It is near impossible to imagine any private company not enjoying the “problem” of high demand for its products and services. Yet there are some products that are repeatedly reported as shortages. There is one thing these products have in common: government intervention, typically in the form of [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, David Zetland, Aguanomics)
I’m thinking that the water managers and politicians in San Diego must be drinking something other than simple, tasty water. It seems that they are bound and determined to implement the most-stupid possible water rationing scheme, i.e.,
Even San Diegans who have torn out their lawns, planted drought-tolerant landscaping and scrimped [...]

(Feb. 21, 2009, Jesse McKinley, The New York Times)
The country’s biggest agricultural engine, California’s sprawling Central Valley, is being battered by the recession like farmland most everywhere. But in an unlucky strike of nature, the downturn is being deepened by a severe drought that threatens to drive up joblessness, increase food prices and cripple farms [...]

(Feb. 20, 2009, The Kansas City Star)
KC’s Water Services Department is discussing the possibility of up to 90 layoffs, Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s budget SWAT team heard Friday.
At the same meeting, the budget panel proposed asking the department to chip in $4 million to help the city get through its budget crisis.
If the City Council approves [...]

(Feb. 20, 2009, IndyStar)
Indianapolis-area water users could see a 17.5 percent increase in their bills this summer after the Department of Waterworks board on Thursday voted unanimously to seek an emergency rate increase.
For the average household using 7,000 gallons of water a month, the measure would mean an increase of about $4.50 in the monthly [...]

(Feb. 19, 2009, Napa Valley Register)

The American Canyon city manager now has the power to order water use restrictions if the drought continues.
Under the new rules approved unanimously by City Council on Tuesday, business and residents who use too much water will pay a premium fee. Customers who already use little water will not have [...]

(Feb. 18, 2009, Steve Gorman, Reuters)
With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California’s latest drought, the nation’s biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
Under the plan adopted in principle by the governing board of the L.A. Department [...]

(Feb. 18, 2009, Reuters)
Householders in England and Wales will face above-inflation increases in water bills this year, water regulator Ofwat said on Wednesday.
The regulator will allow water companies to impose average rises in household water and sewerage prices in 2009/10 of 1.1 per cent plus inflation at 3 per cent, it said in a statement.
The [...]

(Feb. 17, 2009, Atlanta Journal Constitution)

Unaccredited college owes $214,000; King assistant asks radio listeners to help pay.

A lion of the civil rights movement took to the airwaves Monday in a last-minute pitch to keep the water flowing —- and the doors open —- at Morris Brown College.
Meanwhile, some members of the Atlanta City Council said [...]

(Nov. 18, 2008, PerthNow)

HOUSEHOLDERS would be charged for each flush under a radical new toilet tax designed to help beat the drought.
The scheme would replace the current system, which sees sewage charges based on a home’s value – not its waste water output.
CSIRO Policy and Economic Research Unit member Jim McColl and Adelaide University Water [...]

(Feb. 15, 2009, The Colorado Water Examiner)
Mining engineer and hay farmer Gary Hausler was at a recent meeting of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable pitching the idea for a 22 inch water pipeline from the Mississippi River west. The proposal would divert less than one half of one percent of the Mississippi’s flows and could [...]

(Feb. 16, 2009, Business-Green)
Water supplies to Las Vegas could run dry within six years thanks to receding water levels at Lake Mead, officials warned last week, bringing into question the long-term viability of the fastest growing city in the US.
Pat Mulroy, the chief executive of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said that the water level [...]

(Feb. 13, 2009, The Atlanta Journal Constitution)
Atlanta water officials say they’ve discovered one reason why some recent water bills were sky high: Computer software in about 450 water meters miscalculated usage and charged homeowners much more than they should have.
Watershed Management Commissioner Rob Hunter said the department discovered the problem involving some of the 2,800 [...]