California’s wealthy go to the well to stop lawns from turning brown
Homeowners find new ways around water rationing as drought reaches fourth year
MONTECITO, CALIF.— Mandatory water rationing struck this celebrity-filled enclave last year and, within weeks, residents created a market based on avoidance.
Gardens stayed lush and lawns verdant as citizens paid tanker trucks to deliver thousands of gallons to homes in the seaside suburb of Santa Barbara. They drilled in backyards, driving the county’s tally of new wells to a record. Some simply paid fines for exceeding allocations, padding the water district’s budget by more than $2 million (U.S.).
“People feel strongly about their landscaping and want to keep their homes beautiful,” said Patrick Nesbitt, who drilled a well to hydrate parts of his 70-acre estate but let his polo field go dry. “Why should anybody object?”
As drought drags into a fourth year, Californians statewide will confront similar choices thanks to unprecedented consumption cuts mandated by Gov. Jerry Brown. Rationing in the Montecito water district, where the typical house sells for more than $2 million and where Oprah Winfrey, Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. vicechairman Charlie Munger live, shows how the ability to stop one’s property from baking brown depends on a steady flow of green.
The state’s Water Resources Control Board last week outlined its plan for mandatory cuts, which range from10 per cent to 35 per cent. Communities with above-average consumption, which are often wealthier, must conserve most.
The correlation between income and water use makes an emerald lawn symbolize an economic divide, said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a research and policy group in Oakland. Water is unevenly distributed; poor communities in the Central Valley also receive water by tanker, but to drink, not moisten greenery, he said.
“How would we feel if you could pay extra to smoke on airplanes?” Gleick said. “When we decide something is a bad idea in general for society, we don’t want the rich to be able to buy their way out of it.”
As much as 80 per cent of urban water nourishes outdoor landscaping, a feature in ample supply on the sprawling estates of Montecito, an unincorporated hamlet of 9,000 peo- ple 145 kilometres up the coast from Los Angeles.
Country clubs and homes capped with Mediterranean red-tile roofs are nestled between the Santa Ynez Mountains and white-sand beaches of the Pacific Ocean. Residents say the preservation of landscapes and property values are intertwined, and dead and dying foliage increase vulnerability to fire.
Yet virtually no groundwater lies below Montecito, making it reliant on outside sources. In February 2014, as reservoirs ran low and promised water from the state failed to materialize, the Water District declared a shortage emergency. Rationing followed.
In September 2014, each Montecitan used about 241 gallons per day. That compared with residents in Cambria, the least profligate, who used 40 gallons, and to residents in Rancho Santa Fe who topped the list at 585.
Discontent festers. In a recent letter to the editor of the Montecito Journal, resident Bill Reyner accused the district of mismanagement and called the cuts harmful.
“How many of you have lost significant investments in landscaping, seen mature trees die, counted the seconds in your showers, tirelessly checked your water meters and even put up with the built-up urine in your toilets?” he wrote.