Santa Fe joins Mayor’s Challenge to cut water use

Originally published in the Santa Fe New Mexican

#TakeThePledge

Santa Fe is join­ing an an­nual na­tional chal­lenge, com­plete with cash and other prizes, that asks res­i­dents to make a long-term com­mit­ment to man­age wa­ter re­sources more wisely.

Mayor Alan Web­ber is part­ner­ing with may­ors na­tion­wide in the Wy­land Na­tional Mayor’s Chal­lenge for Water Con­ser­va­tion, a non­profit com­mu­nity ser­vice cam­paign that be­gins Sun­day and runs through the end of April, the city said in a state­ment emailed to The New Mex­i­can.

“We love our way of life in Santa Fe, and we want to pass it down to suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions,” Web­ber said in the news re­lease. “That means mak­ing sus­tain­abil­ity a part of ev­ery­thing we do, es­pe­cially where wa­ter is in­volved.

“While we have some of the best wa­ter con­ser­va­tion rates in the coun­try,” he con­tin­ued, “chal­lenges like this are about find­ing ways to get even bet­ter, and I know we have it in us.”

Res­i­dents who par­tic­i­pate in the chal­lenge can win $5,000 to­ward their home util­ity bills, wa­ter-sav­ing fix­tures and hun­dreds of other prizes.

One char­ity na­tion­ally will re­ceive a 2018 Toy­ota RAV4 Hy­brid to serve its com­mu­nity.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion is easy: City res­i­dents visit the con­test web­site www.mywaterpledge.com to make a se­ries of pledges to use wa­ter more ef­fi­ciently, re­duce pol­lu­tion and save en­ergy. Ci­ties with the high­est per­cent­age of res­i­dents pledg­ing in their pop­u­la­tion cat­e­gory qual­ify for more than $50,000 in prize draw­ings.

A spe­cial sec­tion of the web­site al­lows teach­ers and stu­dents to pledge, down­load wa­ter-con­ser­va­tion les­son plans and win class­rooms sup­plies and gift cards.

The New Mexican re­ported in 2016 that Santa Fe al­ready has one of the low­est per capita rates of daily wa­ter use in the dry South­west, at 99 gal­lons, largely the re­sult of in­creased wa­ter rates de­signed to en­cour­age con­ser­va­tion. That com­pares with a rate of 128 gal­lons in Al­bu­querque, al­though util­ity of­fi­cials there said cus­tomer us­age is down this year by about 30 gal­lons.

City of­fi­cials in Santa Fe could not be reached Fri­day to pro­vide more cur­rent sta­tis­tics.

A Santa Fe or­di­nance also calls for out­door wa­ter use re­stric­tions from May 31 through Oct. 31 to keep down use of wa­ter for ir­ri­ga­tion. Vi­o­la­tors of the ir­ri­ga­tion rules can be fined from $20 to $200.

A re­bate pro­gram of­fered by the city also helps spur wa­ter con­ser­va­tion. Home­own­ers can save hun­dreds of dol­lars through the pro­gram in­stalling wa­ter-ef­fi­cient de­vices and out­door wa­ter­sav­ing sys­tems, such as rain­wa­ter catch­ment and drip ir­ri­ga­tion.