S.F. attempts to improve water conservation rebates

When city officials started a rain barrel rebate program for single-family residential water customers in 2003, they may not have imagined that over time it would expand to include rebates for high-efficiency clothes washers, hot water recirculators, cisterns and other commercial devices.

Encouraged by the program’s popularity among private residences, the city in 2010 began providing commercial rebates for high-efficiency toilets, waterfree urinals and other devices. The rebates come in the form of water credits on customer bills.

In the first 10 years of the program, the city gave out close to 11,000 rebates, based on a 2014 city of Santa Fe report about the program.

Still, not many commercial users are taking advantage of the program, while residential participation has already peaked and is declining — down from 533 in 2017 to 470 in 2018.

City water conservation officials are looking for ways to address both issues.

On the commercial front, the city just began working with restaurants to offer tailor-made rebate credits that best fit the needs of those businesses. Next, Christine Chavez, the city’s water conservation director, said she and her team will begin working sector by sector on expanding the program, starting with hotels and moving into assisted living and medical care facilities.

Part of that plan, she said, could be convincing a hotel that while it may get a good rebate for replacing toilets on one floor, it would get a bigger one for replacing all of them.

Meanwhile, she said, part of the reason residential participation in the rebate program has declined is that “we already saturated the residential market because everyone replaced that insufficient toilet or bought a new water-efficient washing machine.”

Officials are looking for ways to strengthen the program’s incentives to draw in more residents, perhaps by incorporating a sliding-scale approach based on a resident’s income.

The city’s Water Conservation Committee also is concerned about doing more to improve the rebate program. One member, Tim Michael, said during a meeting last week that instead of paying out the rebate with credits over time based on how much water a consumer saves, the rebate should be paid upfront to help with the cost of the water-saving appliance.

“The bottom line is … the amount of the rebate is insufficient to attract anybody,” he told the committee members.

Others on the committee agreed, saying they have to come up with a new plan to keep the rebate program attractive. Chavez said committee members will need to work through the idea, a step they plan to take at a future meeting.

Lisa Randall, a committee member who is the sustainability program director for Santa Fe Public Schools, said the district earned a $10,000 rebate credit on the new Milagro Middle School water bill for taking part in the program. In that case, the credit applied to a 40,000-gallon underground tank the district built to capture water from a 72,000-square-foot rooftop, which will save some 220,000 gallons of potable water every year.

“While it is nice to have the $10,000 water credit, the district would never have done it based on that rebate program alone,” Randall told the committee.

The rebate program’s annual budget is $200,000, with any leftover funds carrying over into the next year, Chavez said. Water saved through the program goes into a “water bank” used for affordable housing construction or development or building renovations, such as adding a bathroom.

Chavez said it’s difficult for the city to determine how many rebate customers are from the commercial industry or private residents since the data is based on the number of appliances — not people or companies — involved.

Whether the rebate itself is responsible for the drop in city water usage over the past 20 years remains unclear.

“I think there’s a lot of reasons people have used less water over time here in Santa Fe,” Chavez said. “The water rates have a part in it, the rebates have a part in it, and I think some of water policies passed since we started this — making sure restaurants serve water only on request, for example — play a part in it, too.

“And people here in Santa Fe are very proactive and understand that water is precious in this region. Not that we can’t do more.”