Stop the Guzzlers

To satisfy the demands of a relatively few water-guzzling estates with large expanses of emerald green lawns all summer, the Suffolk County Water Authority has spent millions of dollars adding more wells and other infrastructure on the South Fork. The bill for that investment isn’t picked up by these superusers alone but rather is spread among all SCWA ratepayers.

For most of the year, these additional wells and pumps serve no purpose. During the summer lawn watering season, they are only necessary for the sake of maintaining water pressure for the few hours a day of peak demand, mostly overnight. But that peak keeps getting higher as development continues and more automatic irrigation systems are installed. The higher the peak, the more infrastructure is needed.

South Fork ratepayers could collectively save millions of dollars by mitigating that peak. And it’s not a hard thing to do. The only thing that is missing is the will to do so.

Peak irrigation hours are between 3 and 7 a.m. Adjusting watering schedules to avoid this time period and adopting odd-even watering days — water on even days if your house number is even, and water on odd days if your house number is odd — will bring down the peaks and ensure that water pressure will be adequate when firefighters hook up to a hydrant to battle a life-threatening blaze.

The thought of watering every other day is anathema to those who prize their green lawns. But the fact is, watering every day encourages turf with short roots — which makes a lawn less resilient to drought and foot traffic, and hungrier for nutrients — and leads to fertilizer runoff that pollutes surface waters. Most lawns on irrigation systems are overwatered, especially if the systems lack rain sensors, and actually would benefit from being watered less.

Though the SCWA has been beating the water conservation drum louder and louder for some time — and, according to a recent press release, is beginning to see some beneficial results — most ratepayers are not listening. The fact is, though the SCWA has adopted an odd-even watering policy, it can’t enforce it. It may be the “water authority,” but it has no enforcement authority to ticket those who fail to conserve water. Without levies and fines for violators, the policy has no teeth.

Last month, the SCWA asked the East Hampton Town Board to codify alternative-day watering and to enforce it any way that the board deems appropriate — with the obvious answer being a local law, complete with actual penalties for failure to follow it. “That’s the best thing we can do to ensure that we have water availability,” SCWA’s director of external affairs, Daniel Dubois, told the board.

The East Hampton Town Board should enthusiastically agree to SCWA’s request. It will save town residents money, protect town water from runoff and ensure fire safety. The penalties need not be draconian: Just having a law on the books with some teeth in it should get the attention of most responsible homeowners. Perhaps they can be scaled to take into consideration the amount of water being used, and hand out proportional punishment so that the worst offenders can’t simply ignore it.

But this issue goes well beyond simply East Hampton Town. All of the towns and villages of the South Fork should demonstrate leadership on this issue and enact rules that support the SCWA’s efforts to protect our water supply with sensible restrictions.

Neighboring Nassau County — the county itself, not a water authority — has long had a mandatory and enforced odd-even watering ordinance. It did the heavy lifting so that its many villages and towns didn’t have to take on the task.

Suffolk County is behind on this — and the South Fork, starting in East Hampton, can do its part to help the county start to get up to speed.