Those who think water prices might be high should wait until we have no more potable water in our aquifer. Unless we change to something like Dr. Ulanowicz proposes here, that day will surely come.
Unfortunately, this plan used in the community in St. Augustine is so simple our legislators will likely find reasons to reject it.
The mindset of our DEP and WMDs, which is that they owe unlimited FREE water to anyone who requests it must be changed to: “sure you can have water if you want to pay enough for it.”
Our leaders, who love to postpone decisions by mandating a “study,” need but to direct their study westward in our country to see what water costs in other areas.
It is not free. In some places farmers sell their water allocations instead of crops because it is worth more.
Tallahassee lacks long-distance vision and is reactive (slow reactive) instead of proactive, so they will definitely have trouble with this, but it is a necessary if painful procedure.
Thanks to Dr. Ulanowicz for this piece and to the Gainesville Sun for publishing it. It will appear in the Sunday Issues
section on Feb. 27, 2022.
Controlling Withdrawals From Our Aquifer Is Not Rocket Science
Robert E. Ulanowicz
Guest Columnist Feb. 23, 2022
Anyone interested in the future welfare of Florida is aware that our state is facing a water crisis.
In North Florida, we are pumping more water than is being replaced by rainfall. Flows in our springs and rivers are down some 30%. At the current rate of water withdrawals, we will eventually start drawing up saline waters that lie below our aquifer — a catastrophe that would devastate agriculture and the economy and result in horrendous water costs.
The existing controls on water use are weak and ineffective. Water is free for the taking; existing water bills cover only the cost of extraction and distribution. Water use permits to allow pumping cost a mere $100 to withdraw hundreds of thousands of gallons per day. There is no cap on total regional extraction and new permits are conveniently made available for those with power and money.
Condo owners there were faced with a crippling financial problem. The owners had budgeted $4,000 annually for water that was metered by the city through a single supply line. Annual costs grew to roughly triple the budgeted amount, causing significant strain on the community’s overall finances. An enlightened owners’ board decided that total water costs should be apportioned to each unit according to its use.
Upon receiving a coded electronic signal from a cell phone, the meter transmits the accumulated flow since the last query up to a distance of 500 yards. Thus, the monthly water usage by each unit became available with surprising ease and accuracy.
The results were nothing short of phenomenal. In June 2016, total residential usage was about 520,000 gallons. By October 2016, monthly usage had fallen to about 110,000 gallons, which was less than the base assessment. The total cost of the metering project ($29,000) was completely recovered as savings during the following year.
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Reducing landscape irrigation is essential to protect our springs
This micro-example of rational control of water use has all the elements needed to extrapolate the process to the statewide level. First, a cap or base rate of water withdrawals must be established.
In resource management, this amount is known as the “maximal sustainable yield” — the amount that can be taken from the system without damaging its environment. To date, the water management districts have not estimated maximal sustainable yields for portions of the North Florida aquifer, but reliable overall water budgets can be drafted from data compiled by the Florida Springs Institute.
Next, the infrastructure for monitoring water use must be implemented. This would not have been possible on a regional basis 10 years ago, but as shown by the Tennis Village example, technological advances now provide for small, secure and accurate instruments suitable for installation even in domestic wells.
The final element in the plan is to establish the cost of usage. A suitable rate schedule is one that maintains total usage at or below the maximal sustainable yield. Experience with the management of limited natural resources is that rates should be tiered. That is, the per-unit consumption by each customer is reckoned in a number of steps.
The lowest step would incur the lowest per-unit rate. Each of the additional steps would bear an increasing per-unit charge, making heavy usage prohibitively expensive. Setting the initial rate structure will likely take some informed guesses by resource economists, but the rates could be adjusted on a yearly basis so that results converge on the maximal sustainable yield.
Rescuing Florida’s water from disaster is possible. Tiered water costs are effective at prompting conservation. What we still need is an electorate with the common sense to plan for their own survival.
Robert E. Ulanowicz, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and a courtesy professor with the University of Florida Department of Biology. He is a member of the board of directors of the Florida Springs Institute and the Ichetucknee Alliance. He lives in Gainesville.
