City Hall leads in water saving

<p>They are ripping out all that green grass at City Hall in a volunteer-based project reminiscent of the eastside park-building projects in the 1970s. When the project is done, those who planned it are hoping to save plenty of water, grow a lot of vegetables, and in the process demonstrate that here are different, and better, ways to do landscaping.</p><p>Starting this past Monday, prep work with about 30 volunteers was underway to begin converting the city’s landscape into a “dynamic water harvesting eco-scape, complete with community gardens, water catchment systems and native and edible plants,” according to a fact sheet distributed by the organizers. </p><p>The really heavy-duty work is scheduled for Oct. 24. Interested in volunteering? They are going to need a couple hundred, but it will be educational as well as productive.</p><p>The project is the brainchild of City Manager John Brown, who had devised plans to convert the City Hall landscape, but didn’t have the funds. Meanwhile, Rebuilding Together Petaluma (remember when they went by the name Christmas in April?), which annually goes out and fixes up the homes of less fortunate folks, decided that the city in its current economic morass could use some help. The offer fit in nicely with Brown’s plans.</p><p>Although there are still a great many people in this town who don’t want to adapt, it is still a fact that availability of plenty of water, as we have been used to getting, is pretty much a thing of the past. It’s also a fact that one of the greatest demands on water is landscaping, and particularly lawns. Washing and flushing takes a lot of water, but those acres of grass are true villains when it comes to allocating water.</p><p>Brown, then, was pursuing a double track. First, of course, was to cut the amount of water being used by irrigation and at the same time significantly reduce the amount of dollars spent on water. But there is a parallel purpose here. The City Hall effort can become a demonstration project to first drive home the idea that our approaches to landscaping need to be changed, and second, help people see how those changes can be made effectively.</p><p>Former City Council member Jane Hamilton, the executive director of Rebuilding Together, recruited two other local groups, Petaluma Bounty and Daily Acts, to bring their expertise to the project.</p><p>Volunteers on the project will be learning as well as doing, learning the “theory and techniques for sheet mulching, water catchment and planting dynamic systems with a temporary design to help transform a front yard into a productive food forest.”</p><p>Hamilton said that “one of the upsides is that unique alliances and collaborations are springing up that never existed before.” Early this week, a substantial segment of the prep crew came from the Two Rock Coast Guard station, for example.</p><p>It was not all that long ago that fancy landscaping was at the top of the list for our planners reviewing development site plans, whether it be for business parks or subdivisions. While the experts were telling us we are running short of water, the city was still approving, if not requiring, projects that by their very design were making our upcoming water crisis that much worse.</p><p>City Hall is now showing the way that there are different and better ways to do things. Will it work? One effort at community gardens didn’t work a couple of decades back because strangers would come it at night and clean out the plots, so there will need to be volunteer garden-watch and stuff like that.</p><p>None of this can change the fact that we can’t afford to have massive lawns when we don’t have massive amounts of water, and the City Hall effort is designed to bring things into balance.</p><p>(Don Bennett, a business writer and consultant, has been involved with city planning issues since the early 1970s. He serves on the Sonoma County Planning Commission. His e-mail address is dcbenn@aol.com.)</p>