Right as Rain
As a little-known hub for the practice of harvesting rainfall, Santa Fe is taking the lead in a new way to save the West’s vanishing water.
Melissa McDonald and Nate Downey’s backyard is a microcosm of the water-wise outdoor world they envision for Santa Fe: Stretching between their South Capitol Stamm-style home and the casita they use as the office for their landscape-design business (Santa Fe Permaculture), their water-politic utopia overflows with drought-resistant shrubs and native wildflowers, all of which surround a covered lettuce patch, flagstone walkways, and a large shade tree with a swing for their two children. Yet the most dramatic—and dramatically water-conserving—feature of the yard is invisible. Buried beneath the carefully selected plants and heavily mulched earth, a 10,000-gallon cistern holds an entire winter’s worth of rainfall and snowmelt under the family’s feet, for use during the drier months of the growing season.
The husband-and-wife team are part of the reason Santa Fe has become a national hub for the water-harvesting movement. This vision of a water-sustainable Santa Fe is one that, for 15 years, they and a growing cadre of local design and building professionals have been steadily working to create. Santa Fe Permaculture is just one of the more than 60 businesses based here, from systems designers to parts dealers, that offer services and products related to the practice. “We probably have more vendors for a city our size than anywhere except Hawaii,” says local expert Doug Pushard, founder of the popular harvesth2o.com website and owner of the residential water- systems design and installation business Harvest H2O.
This growth is linked in no small part to an evolving series of state, county, and city regulations created in the last seven years to support and promote water harvesting. Most recently, the Santa Fe city council passed a new long-term water plan this past January. With Santa Fe’s third hike in water fees in 12 years included in the package, there’s more reason than ever for residents to follow in the professionals’ footsteps and find feasible ways to both conserve and harvest the West’s most precious resource. And given the abundance of know-how right here in town, it’s easier to get started than you might think.
WHY HARVEST RAINWATER?
“I think anybody who is doing their share to take care of our watershed should make sure none of their rainwater leaves their property,” says Claudia Borchert, water-resources project coordinator for the City of Santa Fe Water Division. The reasons break down like this: Santa Fe receives an average annual precipitation of 16 inches per year. Coming off a 1,000-square-foot roof, for instance, that amounts to some 9,000 gallons that, if not collected, would otherwise rush out of home drain spouts, across the pavement of neighborhood driveways and streets (picking up pollutants like tar and oil along the way), and into the Santa Fe River.
Properly funneled from its rooftop landing pad into a holding tank, however, the rain can instead replace city water to irrigate a lush yard and garden. If every Santa Fe household collected 9,000 gallons of precipitation each year, it would cut average annual residential use of city water by nearly 25 percent and save each household some $100 to $150 per year in water fees. As for safety, although the Environmental Protection Agency does not consider roof-harvested rainwater (which does pick up a few rooftop pollutants) to be clean enough for use as drinking water, it can be close to potable if properly filtered. In general, says Pushard, whose online water-harvesting forum gets some 200,000 hits per month, catchment water is very high quality.
Amazingly enough, rainwater harvesting wasn’t even an option in this state until 2003, when the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer announced a new policy acknowledging landowners’ rights to store and use rainwater falling on their property. Combined with the state legislature’s passage, that spring, of a landmark bill allowing the use of graywater (including roof-collected water) for irrigation, this gave New Mexicans the green light. Then, as early as October 2003, Santa Fe County took the idea a step further by mandating rooftop rainwater collection for all new, heated structures within its jurisdiction, and actual cisterns for those larger than 2,500 square feet.
The regulations required that each system capture at least 85 percent of rooftop drainage and reuse it for landscape irrigation, with the size of the holding tank based on roof size. The following year, the joint city-county Extraterritorial Zoning Authority extended these regulatory dimensions to apply to every structure within a two-mile ring around the city. But when a similar plan to mandate rainwater collection on new constructions within Santa Fe city limits reached the city council in 2004, it was struck down.
Yet despite consistent opposition within Santa Fe to most water- conservation and -harvesting measures, many have passed—including rebates for rain barrels and the newest set of hotly debated water-rate hikes. On January 28 of this year, the city council passed a set of regulations that, since taking effect March 1, increases water charges by 8.2 percent per year for a period of five years. The new rates, which slipped through a split council with the help of Mayor David Coss’s tie-breaking vote, will (assuming constant per capita usage) bring the average Santa Fean’s monthly residential water bill up from 2008’s $31.51 to $46.72 in 2013—a total increase of nearly 50 percent.
The city’s stated goal in once again increasing water fees is to raise funds for its share of costs in the in-process Buckman Direct Diversion Project. Scheduled to be completed by 2011, the diversion, says Borchert, will pull a stable supply of water from the San Juan– Chama river system, reducing reliance on the too-small (and highly variable) Santa Fe River reservoirs as well as our underground aquifers. And as many point out, it will also encourage residents to use less water. “We are mining our groundwater at an unsustainable rate right now,” says Borchert. “We are taking water out of storage—the water in our aquifers is from the last ice age. We want to use the surface water when it’s there, and only pump the aquifers as a backup.”
Borchert, who acts as the city’s long-range water-supply planner, confirms that the rate hikes are part of a larger effort to create a sustainable water supply for the county—one that accounts for both our growing population and dwindling amounts of available wet stuff. For area residents, this means political, educational, and practical elements are coming together to create ideal circumstances for harvesting rain.
RAIN-COLLECTION SYSTEMS
Harvesting-system designer Doug Pushard’s yard is typical of those in older Santa Fe neighborhoods: small, walled, divided into flagstone walkways and garden zones. And while his home system—which
collects precipitation from his roof and feeds it into a buried, 5-by-17-foot, 1,700-gallon cistern—is designed specifically for his property, it’s not much more complex than a setup that could have been built
a century ago. Talking me through his water’s path from roof to root, Pushard points out that although his cistern has a pump (an active rather than passive system), he keeps his designs as simple as possible.
Catchment systems can and do get much more complicated than Pushard’s, with computerized controls, rain sensors, and timers that integrate the harvesting and irrigation components. But homeowners can avoid overcomplicating things by thinking first about their specific needs. “The number-one cost item is your tank,” says Pushard, “so if you can first conserve water, you can get a smaller tank.” And small tanks are pretty affordable: A seven-foot-tall, 225-gallon, standing cistern with a spigot at the bottom (no pump) costs about $400 and requires very little maintenance.
When it comes to those 50-to-60-gallon rain barrels that increasingly occupy the corners of local homes, however, opinions are mixed. While Pushard still recommends them as the least expensive way to get started, Downey argues that it’s better to install more effective passive means or spring for a larger cistern that’s easier to use. “People are finally realizing that rain barrels are just symbolic,” he says. “Unless you’re using a pump that comes on whenever there’s water in there, a 50-gallon rain barrel will fill up and spill over 70 times in an average year from a 500-square-foot roof. And getting the water out of the bottom part of that barrel is backbreaking and messy.” It can even be dangerous: Last year, an Eldorado woman drowned in her rain barrel while apparently trying to retrieve her cat.
Better alternatives to a full pump-driven cistern—called “passive” means because they rely on gravity to power the movement of water— can make a major impact at a fraction of the cost. “I don’t like to, but I talk a lot of people out of cisterns,” says Downey from behind the desk in his office casita. “Because I just have to tell them up front what it’s probably going to cost.” (Installing a system comparable to Pushard’s would run about $5,000.) But, he stresses, passive means can do more than just complement the work of a pump-driven cistern. Depending on the property, it can even be the cornerstone of a catchment system.
How? The answer, it turns out, is down in the dirt. “It’s about creating environments that make your soil more acceptable to holding water, and that’s one of the hard things in this climate,” says McDonald. “That’s a huge thing that people often overlook.” Most New Mexico soils don’t have the same water-holding capacity of ideal forest loam, and simple additions like a pumice wick—a strategically buried pile of porous stones that absorbs and holds water within the soil for up to six weeks—can be so effective that they may render irrigation unnecessary. “We’ve gone back to a place that had a pumice wick and had been neglected for two or three years—nobody lived there—and the plants were doing great,” says McDonald. “With no irrigation, at the end of a drought. I was amazed.” (Check out Harvesting How-To, opposite, for more on collection-system options.)
HOW SANTA FE STACKS UP
Santa Fe isn’t the first American city to begin to embrace rainwater harvesting on a community-wide scale; both Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, actively support the practice through educational and incentive programs. And in October 2008, the city of Tucson passed the nation’s first law to require rainwater collection on commercial properties. Meanwhile, Austin has been offering $500 rebates since 1998 to residents who purchased new cisterns—a move intended to minimize the need for a new storm-water treatment plant. “The city started literally writing checks,” says Pushard, who first learned about the practice while living there.
Globally, the U.S. isn’t a front-runner either: In Australia and New Zealand, where the governments offer incentives for installing collection systems, 17 and 10 percent of households, respectively, practice rainwater harvesting. Many of the most convenient and attractive catchment-system products available in Santa Fe—from colorful, modular, aboveground cisterns to ornate copper rain chains—are imported from as far away as Down Under (or at least California).
But regionally, New Mexico is in many ways a leader in promoting the practice. Collecting rainfall for home use is still illegal in Washington, and Colorado is just this year beginning to allow harvesting by rural residents. In Utah, putting in a catchment system requires a state permit—but, says Pushard, “the odds of that occurring are none.” And in other states where the practice is legal, water harvesting is still rare in many cities; in Phoenix and Las Vegas, for instance, local participation in city planning and conservation is less a part of the culture than in Santa Fe. Instead, says Pushard, “The preference is to do multibillion-dollar projects to drill for water somewhere else and bring it in, versus looking for simpler solutions.”
For Santa Fe, these simpler solutions have so far been more about the conservation than the harvesting of water. In an effort to decrease water consumption, the city first raised the water rates in 1996. Early in the summer of that year, amid a multiyear sustained drought, the city council enacted an ordinance requiring all residential and commercial water users to reduce consumption by 25 percent of their previous year’s use. By late September, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that nearly a third of the city’s water users had been slapped with surcharges for failing to comply. But even as the city struggled with contested cases and angry residents, the plan was working: By August 1996, the number of users who consumed between 12,500 and 25,000 gallons of water had been more than halved from the year before, down from 20 percent to just 7.5 percent.
Within a decade, Santa Fe was emerging as one of the most water-wise cities in the West. According to the city’s water-conservation manager, Daniel Ransom, residents served by the Sangre De Cristo Water Division reduced their water use by 40 percent between 1995 and 2007. Although he’s tight-lipped about the question of whether our water supply is sustainable, Ransom is more open about the bigger picture of our desert environment. “Sometimes what we say in the Southwest is that when it’s raining, we’re out of drought; when it stops raining, it’s a drought,” he says. “But when you only get a dozen inches of rain per year, and a significant portion of that is during the winter, we’re pretty much always in a drought.”
Getting residents to reduce indoor use by investing in front-load washing machines, hot-water circulators, low-flow faucets, and especially low-flow toilets, says Borchert, has had a huge impact. Outdoors, a panoply of restrictions, including outright bans on everything from hosing down driveways to installing lawns with more than 25 percent Kentucky bluegrass, has not only reduced lawn and garden water use but has also helped push residents to rethink their conceptions about what landscaping should look like and achieve.
In this sense, Northern New Mexico has the advantage of precedent: “Santa Fe is blessed with this traditional culture and people who grew up knowing that you don’t have a lawn unless you have sheep,” says Downey of centuries-old Spanish and Native American water-use customs, which carefully regulated distribution. The influence of both tradition and news of water woes is clear: Since 2002, combined commercial and residential water use in Santa Fe dropped from 137 gallons per capita per day to 103 by 2008. “That’s huge,” says Borchert, who says at-home use is close to 50 gpcpd, down from about 75 in 2002. But, she adds, “I’ve traveled to places in Europe where they use an average of 35.” (According to the EPA, the U.S. uses more water per capita than any other country in the world.) “There are so many things that are already part of their water-conscious culture—things we can aspire to.”
A TURNING TIDE
The changes brought by Santa Fe’s conservation measures have left the community poised for widespread adoption of harvesting practices, despite the fact that public awareness still lags behind the burgeoning industry’s know-how and available services. Local designers point to a steady increase in consumer interest, which they’ve witnessed in recent years, as evidence of a continuing shift. “We were almost a fringe element when we got started in 1992,” says Downey, who estimates that Santa Fe Permaculture grew at a rate of 15 to 30 percent per year during its first decade. “And it was the same with water harvesting in general. Now it’s totally mainstream here.” He and landscape designer Maggie Lee, who founded Terra Flora Garden Design in 1995, both say the majority of new clients now ask for water-harvesting recommendations.
Other numbers back this up: A 2007 Wall Street Journal article reported that orders for harvesting technology at Santa Fe–based Aqua Harvest grew 20 percent in 2006 alone, compared with 5 percent in 2003. And with the county’s rain-harvesting ordinance in effect, more home buyers are being introduced to cistern systems through simple inheritance. The 13,000-acre master-planned Rancho Viejo development, in Santa Fe County south of the city, has so far built some 300 new homes that come preinstalled with cisterns, with at least another 700 in the planning stages. For Chris Musselman, a Chicago transplant who inherited a catchment system when he moved into his West Alameda condominium unit in 2006, embracing water harvesting was a no-brainer: The catchment in his 500-gallon aboveground cistern easily irrigates his small yard. “It’s great for trees,” he explains, “and I use it a lot for container gardening.”
In terms of policy, Pushard praises Santa Fe’s effective water-conservation measures, but stops short of applauding efforts to promote rainwater harvesting. There’s too much, he says, that hasn’t been done—he’s particularly critical of the absence of public education. Richard Jennings, founder of the 11-year-old firm Earthwrights Designs and creator of the elaborate commercial cistern system at the Railyard, says he’d like to see the city put specific installation guidelines into its permit code. “There’s actually a small industry,” he says, “in fixing screwed-up systems.” But, he adds, “I have no complaints about what’s gone down so far. It’s not a linear, always-getting- better thing, but it’s a good process.”
Still, while the benefits of harvesting rainwater are many, the practice isn’t without its doubters, even within Santa Fe’s own water-conservation offices. Borchert points out that as soon as you pull water from any single source, you’re depriving another would-be recipient downstream. If the source is one of this region’s aquifers, that’s the Rio Grande. In terms of the rain, there’s very little evidence to show who may or may not lose out (existing data suggest that collecting rainwater has only a minor impact on downstream flow). Similar concerns have been expressed by state engineers in Colorado, where a grassroots push to allow rainwater harvesting clashes with a water-claims system that’s more than a century old. The practice can also create users with sporadic water needs, complicating water-services planning efforts. “My concern personally,” explains Borchert, “is that if people don’t build a cistern that’s large enough, or if it doesn’t rain, we still have to figure out how to supply them in times of drought. It’s trickier from a policy perspective.”
Pushard laughs off the skepticism. “It’s like they believe the water’s disappearing from the watershed,” he says, citing a Colorado study that found that, in dry conditions, only about three percent of rainfall makes it to streams (that goes up to about 15 percent in wet conditions). He also sees another motive for opposing rain catchment: It would reduce the demand for water provided by for-profit utility companies, cutting into their bottom lines. Yet the changes on the horizon, both here and in Colorado, come as no surprise to Pushard and Jennings. The inevitable necessity of the practice, they believe, boils down to simple math. “Conservation is only using less of what you’ve got,” says Jennings. “Rainwater harvesting is gaining more.” Pushard puts it even more succinctly: “Time is on our side,” he says, “because it’s hard to fight logic over time.”
