Councilman Jim Lamerson speaks at the Citizen's Water Advocacy Group.

As part of the discussion committee member Lamerson put forth the need for the city to have a long term water policy. He feels that Prescott needs a written policy stating their stance on what they will do with their water assets. Lamerson is most concerned about the fact that city rate payers have been charged an additional 20% on their bills for the last four years for pumping water from Chino Valley, and will continue to get that charge, despite the fact that it is still unknown if the promised water project will come to fruition. Lamerson states, “If indeed we get the opportunity to pump that water which we don’t know… 20% of that water belongs to the rate payers who paid for it. And if indeed we don’t get it, 20% of whatever we get somewhere belongs to those people.”

Howard Mechanic , Vice Chair of the Citizen’s Water Advocacy Group sees it a bit differently. He says, “If the project falls through and we lose money who’s going to pay for it? It’s going to be existing rate payers. You have to divide it up somehow. You can’t say existing rate payers don’t have any responsibility and try to dump it on everyone else in fairness. They’re investing in a risk and that’s what it is.”

Mayor Jack Wilson , who is also on the committee, agrees with Lamerson. “I’m on the same page as Jim on the 20%,” and says that the policy can be conditional He states, “We’re talking about how we’re going to do it not if we’re going to do it.”

Dr. Tim Crews , Chairperson of the group, and a professor at Prescott College seemed to feel that the discussion was a good one. One of his primary goals for the committee is organizing the group into different “Task Forces” with specific goals. In addition he said that being “on the same page” as Prescott City Council would help facilitate the goals of the committee. Also if the City Council knows the goals they are working towards, they can offer advice and guidance.

The Incentive Review and Funding Recommendations task force will be working with Shaun Rydell, the city’s Water Conservation Coordinator to look at how to best utilize the incentive funding. One of the items on the list was an incentive for people who purchased a low water usage washing machine. Rydell pointed out that in spring 2009 a federal law goes into effect that says the high efficiency machines will be the only ones you can buy. She feels there is no need for the city to give anyone an incentive to buy one.

Crews would like the group to work out the value of what the city is paying for incentives versus the costs of how much water the item saves at current city rates, and the system used to calculate the costs. He says, “If a shower head saves 1000 gallons of water per year do you add up the value and pay for that shower head based on how much water it saves in the city? Or are we more interested in safe yield and new water supplies do we compare the water with saved, in any of these incentives with the cost of it takes to go get a new gallon of water in any other way? Because a gallon saved is essentially a new gallon of water acquired.” Currently the city is paying between one and 2 cents per gallon for incentives.

Another task force will be working on Prescott’s Conservation Goals. They would like to figure out exactly how much water use could actually be reduced. They will be researching other communities and compare their gallons per capita per day (GPCD) with Prescott’s. Crews said that at the next meeting he will have a presentation on “Scales of Consideration.” He said this will cover, “How many old toilets are there in the city of Prescott? How much lawn there is? The point is to find out is there water to conserve or not. And if so how much. Part of the presentation is a chart done by Herb Dishlip, (of Dishlip Consulting) which shows his projection of how Prescott might reach safe yield with a 22 gallon per capita per day reduction. That’s the role he assigned for water conservation. How realistic is that? What is the role of conservation going to be in achieving safe yield? The committee can’t decide that but they can give council some estimations of how much water there is to conserve. We have no idea right now. We need a realistic target.”

Public trust is another issue the committee faces. Under the title “Conservation Applied to Safe Yield” this task force will try to build public trust in the City’s conservation efforts. Crews said, “It’s my read from the letters to the editor in the paper that most folks who are interested in conservation are interested in seeing it go to safe yield…. if you’re a passenger on an airplane being asked to reduce the luggage weight you’re putting on that airplane you want to know it’s to help the plane fly rather than to squeeze on more passengers. And that’s kind of what the deal is right now with people feeling their lifestyles impacted by conservation potentially like, no watering during the day, some restrictions on washing your car etc. So the reason for putting this on is to build public trust that water conserved is actually going to address safe yield. That may prove to be a very simple task, but, if some if some conversations that Howard’s (Mayor Wilson) had with ADWR (Arizona Department of Water Resources) prove to be true it may be much more complicated than that in the long run.

Mayor Wilson then said, “I specifically changed the name of this committee when I re-constituted it to include “safe yield” specifically for that reason, to engender this idea that we need to connect safe yield to conservation to get the trust of the public behind it because without the trust I don’t see any chance of ever getting close to that 22% (for conservation.) It’s very easy for me as mayor or CEO or whatever you want to call me to say “go do this!” But doing it is another issue. But I think we should definitely take a very strong look at this because I think if we pull this off then we’re well on our way to making some inroads with the public.

Lamerson then spoke about his experience on this committee and that he hopes to see a recommendation from the council addressing several things. “We’re not going to be able to achieve safe yield either for Prescott or for the AMA (Active Management Area) without the importation of water. Under that guise we went out to the public and we told them we’re going to raise your water rates to cover the cost of importation. Importation was in part for safe yield. The public was led to believe that part of the reason we’re going to import some of this water is for safe yield. One of the issues that has bothered me for quite some time is that while we assigned the water rates approximately 20% of the cost of this project to the current rate payers. We didn’t reserve 20% of the water that we’re going to take from outside the AMA, into the AMA to address the safe yield issue or to leave it in the AMA by maximizing our water consumption to our source outside the AMA….. One of the things that the council did do was to set aside the historically irrigated water for either mitigation of public effects of that water resource on the Verde River or for safe yield. And we aren’t going to know, in my opinion, until we start pumping, if there is an effect and to what degree that effect will be. Now, I’m not stupid. I think there will be an effect. But the issue is we don’t know what that effect is going to be. While we have the 3000 – 3600 acre feet of traditionally irrigated water for either one of those two issues. What we haven’t done is been ingenious with regards to what happens if we need all of that for mitigation. We still charged the rate payer in the city of Prescott 20% of this project and haven’t addressed their safe yield issue. So I would hope at some point some water-associated committee within the city would make a policy recommendation that we address this issue. That the 20% of that water resource that the current rate payers are being charged for today and have been for the last four years and are going to be in the future, whatever that rate is going to be, they’re going to pay 20% of it. Regardless if this project goes from $170 to $300 million, they’re going to pay 20% of it. And what we haven’t done is committed 20% of that water.”

Other task force groups which are being set up by the committee include Rainwater Harvesting, a Volunteer Program and City Facilities.

The City Council has four members on the committee; Jim Lamerson, Bob Luzius, MaryAnn Suttles and Mayor Jack Wilson. There are also four City of Prescott employees working with the group; Shaun Rydell, Water Conservation Coordinator, Teresa Ogle from Public Works, Connie Tucker, Water Management Analyst, and James Holt, the project manager for the Big Chino Ranch.

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