Longmont will be looking at further water conservation as it updates its water efficiency master plan.
Water Resources Manager Ken Huson explained to Longmont City Council during a workshop on Tuesday that the city must update its water efficiency master plan every seven years, as per state law. The final deadline for state acceptance is January 2025, but Longmont begins the planning process early to ensure there’s plenty of time for community input, Huson said.
In the early 2000s, Longmont set a goal of reducing customer and city raw water demands by 10% by the time the city is mostly or fully developed. The calculation was based on 2002 average usage for a projected future demand of 35,000 acre-feet of water, so a 10% reduction would be 3,500 acre-feet.
Huson said Longmont has now effectively met that goal, but the city is now looking at more aggressive water conservation goals driven by climate change data.
“With the Climate Action Task Force, one of their outcomes of that effort was they recommended that the city achieve a significant additional overall water savings above the 10%,” Huson said. “Really agreed that we should look at and evaluate more aggressive water conservation goals.”
Staff still needs to study what that new goal might look like. Huson gave the example of maybe a 15-20% reduction goal, or an additional 1,750 to 3,500 acre-foot savings at buildout.
Huson also wants to continue or increase benefits to vulnerable communities with incentives, discounts and rebates for indoor and outdoor water efficiency.
He spoke to city landscape code and arterial right of ways as well, something he hears a lot about when it comes to the city’s water usage.
“Probably the one area that I get more comments from over time is arterial landscaping, whether it be sprinkling on the sidewalk or the street, why is there grass there, in that area,” Huson said. “That is one of the areas that we want to look at hard and do a robust effort at coming up with new arterial guidelines, trying to solve what for me is the community is telling me (needs to be solved).”
The city is looking to implement a “Growing Water Smart” component to the development process, which is a change of mindset when developing a city that puts water into the initial development discussions.
Other topics staff plans to look at during the master planning process include the turf replacement program, conservation water rate updates, consistency in standing and plans related to water, updating watering guidelines and more.
Huson emphasized that increasing outreach opportunities and best practices for members of the community, including homeowner associations, landscapers and developers, would be a priority.
This coming year would focus on development on the update, with the plan to present the draft to the city council in early 2024 with final review and adoption by the end of 2024.
