Marin Municipal Water District develops conservation playbook

The Marin Municipal Water District is bolstering its strategy on conservation with policy updates and incentive programs designed to reduce water use by hundreds of millions of gallons annually.

The draft “2024 Water Efficiency Master Plan” is a playbook that outlines how water is used today in the county, and how the district can help its 191,000 customers in central and southern Marin cut back.

The plan aims to reduce water use districtwide by more than 1,000 acre-feet a year starting in 2025, with even greater incremental reduction targets beyond that. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons of water.

District staffers presented the draft plan to the board at a special meeting on Wednesday.

Carrie Pollard, the district’s water efficiency manager, said that while the strategic plan sets a goal to reduce water use by 800 acre-feet in the next five years, planners wanted to set a target that was “aspirational.”

“This is an aggressive and realistic goal that we can strive for and really work towards achieving and have a significant impact on water use,” Pollard said.

If the plan is implemented, the staff projects reducing another 3,350 acre-feet a year by 2035, and another reduction of 4,160 acre-feet a year by 2045.

To achieve this, the drought response water use would become the new norm for the community over the next few decades, staff said.

Pollard said the plan contemplates goals of 170,000 square feet of turf conversion each year through rebate programs. The plan also looks at a systemwide deployment of wireless metering and customer communication strategies to ensure savings.

The plan proposes sunsetting the high-efficiency toilet rebate and high-efficiency clothes washer programs. The programs would be replaced by a custom rebate program for commercial, industrial, institutional, irrigation and multifamily home customers.

The rebate of the new program would be a 50% cost share or an amount calculated based on water savings, which ever is lower.

Staff are proposing to update the grey water ordinance to provide customers one of three options when establishing a new connection or making a substantial remodel.

A customer could choose to install drought-tolerant plants in all new or rehabilitated planting areas that total at least 500 square feet and use no- or low-volume irrigation.

A customer could install a grey water system or irrigate the site with recycled water, which is required where recycled water is available.

The plan also proposes updating fixture standards to align with the CALGreen standards for interior plumbing.

The plan also asks staff to look at why some people are motivated by drought or environmental reasons while others are motivated by the expense, and how to appeal to each type of customer to make efforts toward conservation.

Board members said they are encouraged by the draft plan and look to create some synergy between other district efforts.

“I really, really think that we should have our water efficiency efforts tied to the analytics that we’re doing on water supply and storage,” board member Jed Smith said.

The district is considering reservoir expansion proposals that would cost upwards of $290 million just to construct, he said. The district is also looking at proposals to connect pipelines between Sonoma and Marin at a cost of $140 million to $380 million.

“We have to look at them next to each other and we have to look at how water efficiency and conservation can help drive us to be more sustainable from a water supply perspective for a long time,” Smith said.

Board member Larry Russell agreed, given the extreme costs to expand reservoirs and pump water into Marin.

“What I’d like you to think about is, if we doubled our budget for conservation or tripled, what could we do to improve the return, if anything?” Russell said.

“It would be great if there was some way to understand, should we be investing even deeper, or is there really a limit?” board member Monty Schmitt said.

Another update on the plan is expected at the communications and water efficiency committee meeting on May 15. More information is at marinwater.org.