Builders Versus Public Water Works (LeakBird)

May.26, 2008 in Public Works, Water Conservation

There’s a growing rift between those who set water policy and developers who must follow these policies to the ‘t’, and it’s not going to get any better any time soon. There was an interesting article in the San Diego Union-Tribune on Thursday, titled “Builders Facing Water Pressure“, about this very issue.

When the economy does finally come back around, however, according to the above article, is when the rift will grow the strongest, between those who make the rules about water policy and those who develop residential and commercial real estate. That is when the demand will have returned, as over-capacity swings back to under-capacity or perhaps a tenuous balance of supply and demand, and housing prices begin to rise again.

“It will be deeper and last longer than many think,” said Warren Buffett to a Berlin newspaper on Sunday, referring to the current recession. I saw a couple Fox News pundits say this weekend, in the wake of Mr. Buffett’s comments, that it would be maybe 6 quarters before the recession ended, and my hunch is that Warren Buffett thinks it will be longer. Regardless, we’re in the midst of it.

What does it have to do with water?

Everything, I might add, because we’re running out of it, especially in a state like California whose population has recently boomed to 38 million. Now’s the time for the public works and the local governments to attempt to reign it back in, to implement a plan precisely because there is an over-capacity of real estate developments, and when that capacity swings back the other way, and all of those condo’s and multi-unit plexes and McMansions and 3/2’s are habitated with lawn-mowing, showering, car-washing families, well…then the spigot will be turned on high, and sewer-to-spigot solutions may be the only viable alternative we have.

It’d be a lot better, IMHO, to keep the Hetch Hetchy from being high and dry. And conservatively speaking, the least we could do is put in place relatively cost-effective means to audit the output of water.

At the same time, installing low-flow faucets and showerheads and conducting dye tests seems to be the only concrete recommendations most public works can offer, other than the general “conserve water” messages.

And as we’ve tried to show, in developments such as apartment complexes there is only a building-wide master-meter (or in New York, water usage is simply measured per square foot), so it’s virtually impossible to incentivize renters when you can’t even measure their indoor water usage without installing $300-a-pop-per-unit water meters.

If you are interested in How You Can Increase Your Cash Flows by $2,500.00 Every Year and Never Pay for High Water Bills Due to Your Tenants’ Running Toilets, sign up for our Free Report here.

Abendigo Reebs is the VP of Business Development for LeakBird Industries LLC in San Francisco, CA. He may be reached by email at ben@leakbird.com

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