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In California drought, a $350 million experiment on tastes

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER, Associated Press
Published: October 31, 2016, 11:46am

SAN FRANCISCO — Drought-ridden California poured more than $350 million over the last two years into an experiment in social engineering — trying to turn residents’ tastes away from water-slurping lawns. For Southern California’s giant Metropolitan Water District, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent paying property owners to remove their lawns represented the agency’s biggest single conservation program ever. Now, state officials and dozens of local water districts are trying to figure out if California’s lawn-killing campaign succeeded.

Here are things to know:

IN A STATE WITH EVER-LESS WATER, LAWNS CAN BE A WORTHY TARGET:

Removing lawns may sound like a small, wonky step, compared to building dams or erecting giant plants to take the salt from ocean water. But the green turf in American yards actually stands as a worthy target for water savings, a public enemy in the eyes of many during a drought such as California’s ongoing five-year one.

Countrywide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates one-third of all water used by American households goes to watering lawns and gardens. That’s 9 billion gallons of water each day — enough to supply drinking water daily for nine cities the size of New York.

ON ITS FACE, THE AMOUNT OF GREEN TURF REMOVED DURING THE PAST TWO YEARS OF DROUGHT DOESN’T IMPRESS.

From 2014 on, rebates ranging from 50 cents to more than $4 for each square foot of lawn removed a total of less than 10 square miles of lawn statewide, figures from water officials around the state say. That’s out of a total of about 1,000 square miles of watered lawns and gardens, according to the Public Policy Institute of California think tank.

WATER EXPERTS SAY THE REAL QUESTION IS: DID THE REBATES HELP TURN PUBLIC TASTES AWAY FROM LAWNS?

For some water districts, such as one in the Northern California city of Santa Rosa, the cost-effectiveness of the program is simple: The district will save more money on water going forward, thanks to the lawn reduction, than it spent on the rebates themselves. But other water districts say the key questions to study are longer term: Will people who took the rebates keep their yards lawn-free for 15 or 30 years, and will the rebates help set trends for lawn-free looks using plants more suitable to the climate? In Southern California, Irvine Ranch water officials’ early calculations are that for every three households that got rebates to remove their lawns, four others removed theirs without rebates.

FIGURING OUT WHETHER THE EXPERIMENT WORKED IS A PROJECT IN ITSELF:

Around the state, water districts are using everything from drive-bys to satellite photos to aerial, heat-sensing cameras to figure out just how much lawn has been killed off. In Irvine Ranch Water District, water officials also sent house-to-house surveys, and drove each block of some neighborhoods. Besides water savings, the California Department of Water Resources also is calculating reduced greenhouse-gas emissions thanks to less water transported and fewer hours of lawn-mowing. Statewide, experts are still in the number-crunching phase on the rebate program.

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