Year-round water restrictions could provide a lesson in conservation, but not the answer to solving South Florida's water woes, utility operators and environmentalists warned Wednesday.
The South Florida Water Management District is considering imposing a three-day-a-week watering limit, drought or no drought, in an effort to boost conservation. The proposal goes before the district governing board on July 12. The new rules would start in September.
However, cutting back year-round on water use won't help without more places to store the water that drainage canals otherwise flush to the sea, said Bevin Beaudet, Palm Beach County's Water Utilities Department director.
Year-round restrictions also have economic consequences for utilities as well as businesses, he said, and residents might as well use more water during times of plenty, Beaudet said.
"Save the water restrictions for when they are needed," Beaudet said. "It doesn't lead to saving any water. ... What isn't used by our customers goes out to tide in the canals."
Environmentalists contend that year-round restrictions would be a good start, but long-term solutions require building more reservoirs to store water and convincing residents to plant drought tolerant native plants instead of water guzzling lawns.
"We have to change behaviors," said Jamie Furgang, Everglades policy coordinator for Audubon of Florida. "When you are trying to teach an old dog new tricks, you have to teach it one trick at a time."
On Wednesday, the district held one of a series of meetings to get public input on year-round cutbacks.
"We have learned a lot of lessons as a result of this drought," agency spokesman Jesus Rodriguez said. "It makes much more sense as we ease off temporary restrictions to go into a year-round culture of conservation."
This year's drought prompted the district to impose temporary, one-day-a week watering restrictions in Palm Beach and Broward counties, the toughest ever in South Florida.
With June on track for above normal rainfall, district officials have said they could ease those temporary restrictions before the end of the month.
Switching to less restrictive, but permanent, restrictions would be an attempt to change the water use behavior of South Florida residents, according to the district. Some cities, like Boca Raton, have already moved to year round rules.
Lee and Collier counties have been under year-round, three-day-a-week restrictions since 2003, but the rest of South Florida would be playing catch up with other parts of the state. The Tampa Bay area went to a year-round, twice-a-week watering limit in 2003. Northeast Florida last year also moved to a permanent, twice-a-week rule.
Unlike the rest of the state, South Florida has Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades as a backup water supply and that is why district officials say they have used restrictions as purely temporary measures.
South Florida soils and water sources are different than other parts of the state with stricter year-round limits, according to the district.
While district officials say landscaping doesn't need to be watered more than twice a week, they say they are proposing to allow three-times-a-week watering to give residents and businesses more flexibility about when to water.
At least half of the drinking water supplied in South Florida ends up getting used for landscaping. The district projects it could reduce water use region wide by 5 to 15 percent by imposing year-round watering restrictions.
"Watering everyday is, let's face it, wasteful," said Jane Bucca, the district's supervisor for alternative water supply and conservation. Year-round restrictions "will help create heartier landscapes."
A 5 to 15 percent cutback in water use could mean that much less water revenue for local utilities, which long-term could lead to rate increases to cover expenses. Utilities would be getting less revenue at the same time the district mandates they build costly facilities to tap into alternative water supplies intended to meet the needs of Florida's growing population, Beaudet said.
"I don't think that the district has fully evaluated what the impact of year-round restrictions might be," Beaudet said.
Lowering water use also lowers the expense of providing water, making it hard to predict the economic impacts of year-round restrictions, Fort Lauderdale Public Works Director Albert Carbon said.
While year-round restrictions would help promote conservation, even during droughts, water ends up getting dumped to the sea by the canals built to keep South Florida dry, Carbon said.
Creating more storage space to hold onto water from the summer rainy season remains the long-term solution to having more water to tap into during the dry winter and spring, Carbon said.
"It's feast or famine," Carbon said. "You are losing freshwater to tide during rain storms right now. We have no ability to store that."
Andy Reid can be reached at email@example.com or 561-228-5504.