In the drought, a green lawn is a scarlet letter

Remember when people could smoke on an airplane? These days, if you saw someone light up on a commercial flight, it would seem jarringly out of place.

The same could soon be true of lush green lawns here in drought-stricken California. As the parched state heads into a fourth year of a drought that shows no sign of letting up, an emerald swath of grass adorning a front yard is going to seem like it belongs to a bygone era.

Water is precious in California, and every drop saved counts. But not all water uses are equal. On the residential side, landscape irrigation, not lengthy showers or inefficient toilets, is the primary water hog. As municipalities across the state look at ways to cut water usage and meet the state’s mandated 25 percent conservation target, lawns are coming under increasing scrutiny.

So, if brown is the new green, what should we do with all of that green grass we have spent years manicuring? The most attractive solution is to tear it out. Some cities, including Santa Rosa and Cotati, offer cash-for-grass programs paying up to $500 to homeowners that decide to rip out their lawns and replace them with artificial turf or drought-tolerant landscaping.

Petaluma doesn’t have such a program, but it should. The City Council will hold a special meeting on April 27 on ways the city can incentivize water conservation. All options, including cash-for-grass, should be on the table.

The city does have several programs to encourage water savings. Commercial, industrial and multi-family residential water account holders can receive up to $900 for installing so-called smart irrigation controllers that use data about soil moisture, evaporation, sunlight, temperature and humidity to calculate how much water should be applied to the landscape. The city provides free mulch, native plants and drip irrigation kits to homeowners wishing to replace their turf. A city water efficiency expert will even come to your home for free to test the sprinklers for leaks and program an efficient irrigation schedule.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s executive order on mandatory water conservation calls for replacing 50 million square feet of lawns throughout the state. That translates to 77,000 square feet of grass to be removed in Petaluma. Converting the football fields at Casa Grande High School and Petaluma High School to artificial turf is a good first step.

The city can do more to curb the use of potable water for irrigation. It could ban planting lawns with new construction. It could limit lawn watering to certain days. It could add more “purple pipe” so that more residents can use recycled wastewater for irrigation. And it could require golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes to make significant cuts in water use and ban watering of grass on public street medians.

Petaluma residents guzzle more water on average - around 61 gallons per person per day - than residents of other cities in Sonoma County, who consume about 50 gallons per person per day. That’s still below the statewide average of 72 gallons per person per day.

Fortunately, Sonoma County does not rely on reservoirs fed from the paltry Sierra snowpack. Nor do we have the kind of water-intensive crops - such almond trees, which take a gallon of water to produce one nut - like the Central Valley.

Our main sources of water, Lake Sonoma and Lake Mendocino, are in pretty good shape for now. But a hot summer followed by another dry winter next year could return these reservoirs to alarming levels. Several large water users call Petaluma home, including breweries, dairies and poultry producers, further constricting our conservation efforts.

As we face the real possibility that a changing climate could make drought conditions a permanent part of the California landscape, we are running into what water managers refer to as “demand hardening,” when all of the easy conservation methods have been used and we still need to save more water.

It’s now time to start looking critically at our thirsty lawns and thinking about becoming Zen rock gardeners.