[INTRO]
Christoph Lohr: Welcome to this week's episode of "The Authority Podcast: Plumbing & Mechanical." This is part one of a two-part series where I'll be speaking about plumbing resiliency, and drought prevention with Cynthia Campbell, water resources management adviser for the city of Phoenix; Terrence McCarthy, water resources policy manager for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; and finally Doug Bennett, conservation manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. This week, we're going to focus on the concept of drought prevention, and as I was corrected by one of our guests today, including drought preparation, some of the things that we need to realize in the plumbing industry is that every municipality is different and that different approaches may be needed and are likely going to be needed for different locations.
Therefore customized approaches to fixing this problem are important and engineered solutions need to be tailored for the people they serve. And as a result, there's this kind of mantra of cultural, cultural, cultural, or culture, culture, culture, when you're thinking about what various locations will do compared to others, to try to help fix this problem.
So without further ado, let me introduce our three panelists for this week. First is Cynthia Campbell, who is the water resources management adviser for the city of Phoenix. She manages the city's water portfolio and advises the city manager and Water Services Department on policy issues relating to long-range water planning and strategy.
She's the city's liaison with the state of Arizona Central Arizona Project, Salt River Project, and other organizations on water resource issues. Prior to accepting the role of water resources management adviser, Cynthia served the city of Phoenix as assistant city attorney for five years. She also spent five years as a compliance manager of the Water Quality Division of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and three years as assistant attorney general at the Arizona Attorney General's Office.
She's a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law, and has a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Cynthia, welcome to the podcast.
Cynthia Campbell: Thank you very much. So good to be here.
Christoph Lohr: It's good to have you here. Next up is Terrence McCarthy, who is the water resources policy manager for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, also known as LA DWP. He's a licensed professional civil engineer in California, and his current responsibilities include management and development of water conservation programs; monitoring and evaluating regulatory and legislative issues; pursuing external funding and support for programs participating in statewide and nationwide organizations to leverage opportunities; and coordinating with many regional partners for water sustainability in Los Angeles.
Terrence spent a portion of his career doing capital project management on everything from sludge digesters at wastewater treatment plants to baggage handling systems at airports before moving to LA DWP Water Resources Division, where he has managed things like a climate change study on the Eastern Sierras and a water conservation potential study to assess the remaining water savings potentials moving into the future in Los Angeles.
Terrance, thanks for joining us today.
Terrence McCarthy: Thank you, Christoph. It's great to be here.
Christoph Lohr: And last, but certainly not least, we have Doug Bennett, who literally began his career "in the trenches" in 1980 as a landscape maintenance and irrigation technician working his way through college. Armed with a bachelor's degree in agriculture and a master's degree in business, he served eight years as an assistant professor for New Mexico State University, where he specialized in urban horticulture and promoted water-efficient landscape and efficient irrigation techniques.
In 1995, Doug developed and managed a variety of water efficiency programs for the city of Albuquerque, including landscape conversion rebates, water waste enforcement, residential retrofit audits, appliance and fixture rebates, and landscape industry education. Since 2000, Doug has been conservation manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, managing one of the nation's leading conservation incentive programs and coordinating regional water efficiency efforts for the Las Vegas, Nevada, area.
Doug, it's great to have you on.
Doug Bennet: All right, Christoph. Good to be here.
Christoph Lohr: Well, with that introduction, hopefully our listeners can hear that we have a Southwest theme, and that was intentional. As we had conversations to prepare for this podcast, we wanted to kind of focus a little bit on the Colorado River, and three of the largest users of the Colorado River within the region, and just to kind of highlight some of the differences in thinking. So really excited to have all three of you on; thank you again in advance for your time, and really looking forward to having your expertise shared with our listeners. And to start things off the first question, to Doug, which is how do we define drought conditions?
Doug Bennet: Well, you know, there's obviously a definition of a drought, a hydrologic imbalance where simply precipitation is inadequate to meet the needs of the system, both its natural needs and the users on that system. But I think it's important to look at it through a lot of different lenses. So here in Las Vegas, we normally only get about 4 inches of rainfall per year.
We'd be pretty happy to have all 4 inches in any year because that doesn't happen too often. But if you only got 4 inches in, for example, in Los Angeles, or in Tampa or somewhere else, it's a crisis. So putting it in perspective, you have that local perspective, but even more important, the Colorado River, which threads my community together with Cynthia and Terrence's, most of its water is coming from more than 500 miles north of us.
So while it's continuously dry in Las Vegas, and people say we're in a perpetual drought, the reality is we're more focused on the drought conditions that may be several states away. And so people need to look at the big picture in terms of how their local water supply works.
Christoph Lohr: Yeah, there definitely seems to be a, like you mentioned, Doug, this kind of almost dichotomy between where the water comes from, like you mentioned, from 500 miles away and how the impacts of various locations and the weather patterns with various locations can impact that. And then I imagine there's a little bit of a relative nature to drought as a result. Cynthia, do you to kind of talk about that? I mean, even Las Vegas and Phoenix, there's obviously many similarities, but even there there's some differences I would imagine, too.
Cynthia Campbell: Right. That's correct. I really agree with Doug's comments about the relative nature of drought. I really think that you have to think, it's not so much how you define drought in terms of this conversation, but whether or not you consider it to be a temporary situation, or is it something that's more institutional at this point or routine like is probably more the case for Phoenix and Las Vegas, and probably more and more for Southern California as well.
You know, in other parts of the country, when you talk about a drought, drought can happen obviously anywhere in the country, but for many locations, they'll face their "drought" in a single summer or a small amount of time. What we're looking at here on the Colorado River Basin is something much more ominous than in many ways, and that is that we're looking at a long-term potential reduction in supply, and whether you call that drought or mega drought, or hot drought or the new normal, either way, the point is that we have to kind of think more of it as it's the way life is right now, here in the Southwest. It may be the way life is forever. And so we're always going to be hot, it's always going to be dry, and while river conditions may ebb and flow, because it is hot and dry in these locations, we have to think about this on a more cultural way; we have to adapt as a culture to live within our means in terms of water.
Christoph Lohr: Well, and that point you make, Cynthia, about culture, and that kind of also makes me think when it comes to drought and drought conditions and that drought preparation and prevention, and I think you were the one that mentioned that it's more preparation than prevention in many locations, that makes me think too, that a local history, when it comes to trying to manage drought and managing little water supplies, can have its impact on drought conditions too. I guess Terrence, have you seen anything like that in that regard , where local history has had that sort of an impact on consideration of drought?
Terrence McCarthy: Yeah, so feeding a bit off of what Cynthia was talking about and Doug, in California here, we've experienced several droughts throughout the past many decades, and in the early times we've been more reactive than proactive, and immediately following those droughts, we've seen a significant rebound, but with the most recent drought we had here in California, we saw that demands somewhat stayed low, and it goes in line with the California regulatory requirements of making conservation a California way of life. And so to that point, if that cultural shift of kind of changing and here in Los Angeles, we've had a long history of success in responding to droughts and implementing change to get people more aware of what a valuable resource water is to not only life, but also business and other things that we've reached a point where we're trying to get a little higher on that tree of finding the most efficient uses and being creative to try and identify the best way to use water in times of drought and in times of non drought as well.
Christoph Lohr: Well, let me bounce that back to you, Terrence. What is the best approach to drought prevention or drought preparation? And is there just one way?
Terrence McCarthy: I don't think there is one way. I think there's gotta be multiple ways to address drought prevention, and balancing that with what works for not only water utilities, but also for the customers they serve. First off, one approach might be diversifying your supply portfolios instead of relying on one source to get your water from. But that must be done cost effectively to kind of balance that impact to customer bills, because some water supplies that may be more resilient are going to cost more to generate for the water utility, and that'll show up on customer bills. And then also mandatory requirements are most effective with effective communication and messaging, but they also need to be tied with some form of monitoring or enforcement because otherwise people will forget that those are the rules and that's what we need to be doing to be more efficient with our water use.
And then finally, it needs to be achieved that efficient water use without sacrificing the quality of people's experience with that water. So, a good example I like to liken to is taking a shower. I'm sure people could probably still clean themselves with a quarter of a gallon a minute, but it wouldn't be what they're used to, and it also wouldn't be extremely comfortable for them. So you still get the same effect of cleaning, but you still need to maintain that satisfaction of the quality of that product.
Christoph Lohr: I like it. Doug, I was gonna say, do you want to add anything to that?
Doug Bennet: Yeah, I want to go back and revisit.
So Cynthia talked about long-term drought, and the Colorado River is essentially in its 21st year of significant drought conditions. And then Terrance talked about shorter-term drought. So the watershed in his region of California, actually, they have a lot of diversity in their water portfolio, but the rainfall and the snowfall in California can make a significant difference in whether water's available as normal, or it needs to be constrained.
And one of the challenges that all of us have is these programs, in some cases you find yourself turning drought on and off because Mother Nature may do that too. Or a policy can do that to you as well. But you have to tell people, "It's a crisis." I mean, and some places are literally going, "It's feast, it's famine. It's feast again. It's famine." It's so hard to build that culture around that, whereas instead of a light switch where we just say, "It's either on or off," it's almost like we need to develop more of a dimmer switch. I need it to be a little darker in here, a little lighter, a little darker, and be able to have a lot more of a sliding scale. And so one of the things I've found is super important as far as preparation is, we talked about culture, is community engagement because utilities don't do this on their own. You can make whatever rules you want, policies, et cetera, et cetera, you really get the greatest impact from your community performing voluntarily. That people get behind something. So we found that out in the early 2000s, that all the programs that we created were dwarfed in their measurable water savings by other things that people just did, but we didn't know what they were exactly, right? So it's really important to bring your stakeholders in, your businesses, all the players and the economic, environmental messaging, and build those relationships so that everybody knows what you're faced with, what the choices are that might be available to you and what the potential consequences are of choosing different options, and then letting the community help guide you so that you can say we're doing this together, not I dropped this on your head, like an anvil in a cartoon kind of thing.
Cynthia Campbell: I couldn't agree more. I think the way Doug described conservation efforts is really the way that Arizona has largely approached it historically, and probably one of the reasons why we don't have short-term types of programs just because it is a long-term problem from our perspective. I don't even know if we have a dimmer switch here.
I wish we did, but I think we're just always on. And we're trying to have our customers understand that we're always on without communicating that somehow we're in a crisis mode; the crisis mode is what we're trying to avoid, and we approach it from that perspective, that look, this is the way it is all the time.
And it's not a crisis as long as you're prepared for it and you understand that that's part of our reality.
Doug Bennet: But the challenge of the long haul, right, Cynthia, is the burnout, the conservation complacency. I mean, people can actually get tired of towing the line at some point. And as you know, like Terrence said, you see this rebound effect.
So people will do all this difficult work or make better decisions, and then after a while they start to slip back a little into their other habits, and Terrance brought up another good thing: the agencies themselves have expenses and anticipated revenue needs and bills to pay and so forth.
So when I was just a young conservation pup and I was working for the city of Albuquerque and we, I can't remember what our conservation goal, I think it was 5% and we got 8. And I was so happy. We were like high-fiving over in the Conservation Department; the Finance Department hated us.
They were like going, wow, and they don't care if you had planned financially to get 8 if that was the plan, but surprisingly it was the first time I learned that overperformance has consequences for others, right? And that there was an issue in terms of the loss of revenue and the ability for the agency to meet its financial demands.
And so there's so many facets to this. It can be much more complicated than you can imagine. And especially on the Colorado River, you're talking about nations and states.
Christoph Lohr: And that's a great point, Doug. And I want to hit on that here for a second. You mentioned that it's more complicated, right? And there's all these kinds of unintended consequences of things. My sense is that many folks think, "Oh, water conservation," or I shouldn't say many folks, but there's a large swath of folks in the population that maybe think, "Oh, water conservation is a simple thing," you know, and that, "Why don't we just go ahead and use low-flow toilets in every area as well?"
So I think it was Doug, you had mentioned to me that first off the terminology, low-flow toilet, it's high-efficiency toilet in some areas. And then Terrance chimed in that, low-flow toilets might be used in some other areas, but that one technology that people think maybe it's a simple fix, that it's going to help in some areas and it might not in others.
And I guess, let me go back to Cynthia. You kind of had mentioned, kind of expanded on that concept of the dimmer switch. I mean, why is the technology like that going to help in some areas and not in others? Why is it not a simple fix?
Cynthia Campbell: Well, one of the reasons is because the low-flow toilet is, is new technology, so if you are a community that is rapidly growing, like, say the Las Vegas area and some parts of the Phoenix area as well, new construction is more likely to use some of the most efficient plumbing devices, which means if you're trying to do a conservation program based upon replacing or retrofitting low-flow toilets, that's only really so effective in areas of the city that are older, where the original plumbing is not as efficient as it could be. I will say that using those types of programs to change out, retrofitting, more efficient plumbing is, it's been an amazing boon to conservation. We've seen some significant declines in water use that we largely attribute to more efficient plumbing devices, but again, there's a case for the diminishing returns at some point. That only lasts as long as there are places to change out the plumbing. I think Doug pointed out in one of our conversations before that you can only go so efficient and then people are kind of like, "Well, I'm not looking for the super, super, super efficient toilet."
No, and that's a, that's a good point. I was gonna say, Terrence, I think you had mentioned to me and then I'll pass it over to Doug, but Terrence, you had mentioned to me that like in LA, low flow is definitely something that you guys think about quite a bit. Do you wanna just expand on that? And then Doug, if you want to chime in right afterwards, by all means.
Terrence McCarthy: So it's going back to the terminology, low-flow toilets and high-efficiency toilets, premium high-efficiency toilets. There's all these different gradations on toilet efficiencies, but one of the things that we've been very successful in the '90s, we had a toilet replacement program that installed low-flow toilets, and now that we've come full circle, 30 years later, we're still running a toilet replacement program. But as Cynthia had mentioned, there's a point at which you reach a diminishing return where swapping out low-flow toilets for high-efficiency toilets, or high efficiency for premium high efficiency, that the gains you earn in those achievements are kind of dwarfed by the cost of doing that. But just one other quick point I wanna make up is that, again, this is a site-specific kind of question because we have our programs, but then also just drilling down to a specific building may not have good infrastructure for a 0.8-gallon-per-flush-toilet to be able to move all of that waste downstream, and so it may not work best for them. And then another thing too, if as I was referring to before, with a diversified water supply portfolio, if an agency relies on recycled water significantly, even for potable reuse, reducing those toilet flows is going to hit you on the downstream and not only for water reuse, but also for wastewater infrastructure impacts.
Doug Bennet: Yeah, I think Cynthia and Tara have good points, but that goes back to understanding how your watershed works and how your utilities work and how the policy works where you live. So Cynthia's right — Phoenix and the Las Vegas area have an awful lot of homes that are post-1994 homes, so there's not a lot of room for new fixtures.
Plus we have native replacement of fixtures. I mean, most people don't have the same showerhead that came with their house 21 years ago, right? And so they go to the store and they find these higher-efficiency fixtures, the WaterSense-labeled fixtures. But you look at LA DWP or any of the coastal cities, much of their water throughout history, their wastewater was being treated and cleaned and then discharged to the ocean in a lot of cases. So being able to recycle the water in California is definitely, I mean, if you have that situation that you're just discharging it, you want people to be as efficient as they can be with those indoor appliances, right? Because that's less water coming out of your potable system. In our case, in Las Vegas, all of our water is being either passively or actively reused. So even if there's, I have some house that was built in the '50s and they still have their 5-gallon toilet in that house, it's 5 gallons in and it's 5 gallons out for reuse.
So it doesn't make any significant water resources benefit for us, even if I did have the old toilets. Our focus is purely on what we call a consumptive use of water, things that evaporate water to the atmosphere, things that make a one-way trip from the Colorado River into our city and never make it back to the Colorado River again. That's what we're concerned about; that's what eats up things. So there's some exciting projects I know in the coastal ... Terrence, I'm sure you've got a whole laundry list of recycled water projects because they're super productive in conditions like that, where the water wasn't able to be put back in your portfolio in some cities, El Paso, and then a number of other cities they'll treat the wastewater to high potable water standards and re-inject it back into their aquifer because they don't want to lose it from their system. So there's some real exciting things going on there. And all of those things may affect where you choose to put your conservation effort.
Christoph Lohr: That's a really great point, Doug. And I guess Terrence, did you want to touch on any of that before we moved on through the podcast?
Terrence McCarthy: Yeah, sure. We do have some programs moving forward. We are just starting here in Los Angeles to do our groundwater replenishment program, and that's going to be starting up in the next year or so where we do the advanced treatment of our recycled water and then spread it over the basins to go back into the groundwater basin and then use that water for potable uses.
But then one of the bigger, one of the bigger platforms we have going, and we're in the planning stages now for, is what we're calling Operation Next, which is where we take all of the wastewater that goes to our reclamation plants in the city and we recycle it for beneficial uses, and a large majority of that is for whether it be indirect potable reuse or direct potable reuse.
And so that's a big program that we're starting up right now to become more like our friends in Arizona and Las Vegas.
Christoph Lohr: Awesome. That concludes part one of our two-part episode with Cynthia, Terrence and Doug Join us next week when we'll continue our conversation and discuss the best ways to communicate drought conditions to water users, getting kids engaged in water conservation and strategies for minimizing the negative impacts of drought.
[OUTRO]
