El Paso homeowners conserve water by using crushed rocks and native, low-water plants (such as cacti) for landscaping, a practice known as xeriscaping. El Paso also has a city ordinance to limit turf use to no more than 50 percent of a house’s landscaping space.Photo: Marie GilotEl Paso is the Wild West. Dust storms, scorching temperatures, and 9 meager inches of rain a year (New York gets 43).

A border town at the very end of Texas and in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert, El Paso is a great setting for a cowboy movie, but the harsh landscape makes the future uncertain for this growing city of 600,000 people.

In 1979, a study warned El Pasoans that if they continued to dip freely into their underground aquifer, it could run out of fresh water by 2030. The town turned that bleak prognostication around when it made water conservation a priority 20 years ago, and became a national model in the process. (Read a Q&A with the head of El Paso Water Utilities.)

The beginning

Today, El Paso is a city that’s hyper conscious of water. The use of low-water plants and crushed rocks in landscaping — a practice known as xeriscaping – is the norm. Neighbors rat out neighbors if they see water runoff in the streets. And water news gets front-page treatment in the local press. But that wasn’t always the case.

Twenty years ago, El Pasoans were blissfully wasting water. Lavish lawns were everywhere and the Hueco Bolson, the aquifer that provided 90 percent of El Paso’s water, was being depleted by a foot and a half per year. Then, in 1991, the El Paso Water Utilities board put together a long-term plan. The highest priority was a conservation program which included a mix of strategies — some compulsory, some incentive-based, and some voluntary — including:

• A tiered water rate structure that punishes heavy users.
• A landscaping ordinance limiting lawns to no more than 50 percent of landscaping space.
• A watering ordinance that bans residential watering on Monday, and between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. during the summer. The ordinance allows even-numbered addresses to water on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, odd-numbered addresses on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. No water is ever allowed to flow into the street.
• A series of rebates which include $1 back for every square foot of turf replaced; $100 to switch to a front-loading washing machine; free low-flow shower heads; and rebates for low-flow toilets and to change from swamp coolers to refrigerated air units.
• Education programs including school visits by “Willie the water drop,” and recent construction of the Tech2O education center.

With the help of the conservation program, El Paso’s utility exceeded its goal of reducing per-capita water consumption 20 percent by 2000. The city reached a new goal of 140 per-capita gallons per day (another 12.5 percent reduction) four years ahead of schedule in 2006.

The dreamers

Ed Archuleta, 68, has been the president and CEO of the El Paso Water Utilities since 1989, overseeing water, wastewater, reclaimed water, and storm water service. Archuleta launched El Paso’s first water conservation program, which is still in effect today. Asking people to change their behavior today to preserve water resources in the future was a hard sell. Archuleta remembers facing irate customers brandishing their water bills at heated City Council meetings. To overcome resistance, Archuleta reached out to the community through the media, launched an education campaign, included community members in steering committees, and joined El Paso social clubs. “The failure of public utilities a lot of time is that they work on the concrete and steel, but they forget the people,” he says.

Charlie Edgren, 63, is the editorial page editor for the El Paso Times and the former editorial page editor at the now-defunct El Paso Herald-Post. Edgren and his colleagues in the local media enthusiastically jumped on board to help Archuleta’s water conservation campaign, publishing editorials and daily water consumption statistics, reminding people of the odd-even watering days schedule, and exposing water abusers. “People are so used to turning on a faucet and getting water that it frightened people a little to hear that it was really a finite resource,” Edgren says.

Bill Addington is the long-time water chair for the Sierra Club in El Paso and a familiar face at council meetings where he regularly holds elected officials’ feet to the fire. “I don’t believe they really believe in conservation,” he says.

The money

The budget for El Paso’s conservation program is $1 million a year in staffing and marketing expenses. In addition, El Paso Water Utilities spent $2 million to $3 million a year on consumer rebates. Officials estimated that the program saved $400 million in construction cost by postponing treatment plant expansions that would have been necessary to supply a growing population with enough clean water.

The outcome

(Larger version.)Per capita consumption of water has gone down from 200 gallons per day in 1990 to the current 134 gallons per day. The reduction has allowed El Paso to produce the same amount of water now as it did 20 years ago despite a population growth of about 250,000. More importantly, the Hueco Bolson aquifer is no longer shrinking. Experts believe that if El Paso stays the course, 75 percent of its aquifer will still be there 100 years from now.

The copycats

El Paso’s downtown viewed from the Franklin Mountains, with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in the background.Photo: Marie GilotBy now, many cities have realized that conservation is the most cost-effective way to stretch water supplies, and they have turned to El Paso for guidance. What has made El Paso a model for water conservation is that despite its arid location and modest means (over a quarter of the population live below the poverty level), the city has managed to sustain its comprehensive approach to water conservation. Now, with a Texas law mandating that all cities draft a water conservation plan, public officials are looking
at El Paso’s proven methods. San Antonio, Texas, Albuquerque, N.M., and several smaller towns studied El Paso’s approach, says Ed Archuleta, who studied water conservation programs in Tucson and Phoenix when he was designing El Paso’s initiative. “You don’t always have to redesign the wheel,” he says.

Ed ArchuletaPhoto: Marie GilotBeing president and CEO of a public utility on the U.S.-Mexico border comes with a unique job description. Ed Archuleta, of the El Paso Water Utilities, had to figure out how to make water resources last while sharing them with another country, Mexico, and with another state, New Mexico. Archuleta has been navigating this incredibly complex political environment for 20 years now. During that time, he also managed to implement a nationally recognized water conservation program.

Q. Can you describe what awaited you on your first day on the job those 20 years ago?

A. El Paso had been in a lawsuit with New Mexico over water for 10 years. The [El Paso Public Utilities] board had decided prior to my time to pursue trying to get water from New Mexico and that’s what ended up in a legal battle. When I came in, the board asked me to see whether I could settle the lawsuit and whether there was any other way [to get water].

Q. What did you do?

A. I settled the lawsuit and I ordered a long-term plan to look at our options.

At the top was conservation. We needed to take some of the demand off. Second was to work with the irrigators, to see if we could pick up more water rights (so we could use more surface water from the river). We used to have 90 percent ground water. Now it’s more like 40 percent ground water and 60 percent surface water.

Q. Are relations better with New Mexico?

A. There’s a lot more we could do. I think eventually there will be some kind of partnership between Texas and New Mexico because something has to change. But today, politically, it can’t be done.

Q. Why is that?

A. Water is a protective issue.

Q. So El Paso shares some ground water with New Mexico, but it also shares it with Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s sister city in Mexico. How do you manage that?

A. There’s no ground water treaty between the U.S. and Mexico so they can pump as much as they want and we can pump as much as we want. They used to pump 100 percent out of the aquifer. When I came on, nobody knew the water folks in Juárez. I said, we have to meet those people, work with them, plan with them. Now they built two primary wastewater treatment plants. They also started conservation even though their consumption per capita is only about half of ours.

Q. Back to conservation. Your early efforts like the watering ordinance met with much resistance from consumers and city representatives, didn’t it?

El Paso Water Utilities’ educational efforts often target children, hoping they will be the catalysts for change in their homes. Here is the winning poster of a contest urging El Pasoans not to clog natural water drains with trash.Photo courtesy of Marie GilotA. It wasn’t easy. I remember going to a public hearing and I had some people say, “You’re from New Mexico, right?” I said yes. “Well this is Texas. We don’t do this in Texas.”

We went through a whole education program.

I went to a lot of meetings — the Rotary club, the Lions Club, Kiwanis, Neighborhood Associations, all kinds of people. We joined the Chamber of Commerce, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. I became a member of the Builders’ Association. I was involved in the Symphony.

We set up a 30-person steering committee with people from the community.

We had ads with local personalities. Back then, there was a taboo on spending money on marketing. I had to convince the board that we needed to do education.

We used to do daily reporting in the El Paso Times: How much water we used yesterday. And how did we stand year to date. It was right there with the weather [forecast]. The Times wanted to know, who are the biggest water users in El Paso? And [they] filed open records requests. So when people saw their names in the paper and how much water they used — that’s public information — well, that kind of peer pressure did a lot of good.

As it stands now, I’d be surprised if you found a lot of violations.

Q.Today, consumption is at 134 gallons per person per day, compared with 200 back in 1991, and you are able to produce the same amount of water as you did 20 years ago, even though the population has grown by 250,000 people. Is your work done?

A. No, this is forever. We can’t go back to our old habits. We live in the desert.