Hear, hear!  I have been here a year and have been wondering why there are no watering restrictions.  The amount of water I see running down gutters is disgusting.

Also:  I know it is usually reccomended to water in the evening for conservations purposes, but most people around here seem to think "evening" means 2am, even when it's 38 degrees out.  Stupid.  The apartment complex I live in, which waters every night around two, has almost no grass.  It was green and healthy before the weather cooled.

Great post adam~ we need to ask ourselves some serious questions.

ya know ADAM...your'e favorite clean air board, CARB, makes farmers from north of Sacramento, all the way down to the border, to the eastern boundries of Arizona and Nevada, WASTE hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day......................

that the farmers, BY LAW, have to put down on their dirt roads to attempt to halt airborne dust.

maybe you could harp on them a little too.

..........now that my 110,000 gallon pool has been drained, i have to go fill it up  :?)

being a resident of Bako my entire life, i get the giggles when people have the gall to complain about the lack of rain we get here in the southern San Joaquin Valley.  In case some of you havent noticed, we are surrounded by mountains on all three sides of us.  As you were taught in elementary geography, as clouds rise up to meet and defeat the mountains, all their moisture is squeezed out of them.  that is why in three directions all around, the cities get much more rainfall then we do.  Really, all one would have to do to know this is to study Bakersfield's past history of rain, and see that, as far as classification by rainfall goes, we qualify as a desert.

learnem, I did not complain about the lack of rain in Bako. What I pointed out was that no conservation policies are in place in the city. The stae is suffering from more than three years of drought and no conservation of water happens here. This is one of those areas where responsible people should do the responsible thing and conserve, but without actual rules in place responsibility seldom happens.

Also since this area is so dry and with wind issues much of the time it seems ill advised to surround the city with giant dairies that contribute so heavily to the dangerously bad air quality. I am not an opponent of small dairy farms by any stretch, but these mega dairies pose real threats to our health.

Thanks for your wry observations. Thanks, Sage and crosemeyer as well.

 Also since this area is so dry and with wind issues much of the time it seems ill advised to surround the city with giant dairies that contribute so heavily to the dangerously bad air quality. I am not an opponent of small dairy farms by any stretch, but these mega dairies pose real threats to our health.

Im in agreement with you on that point Adam.  we shouldnt have dairies in the southern-most sections of the San Joaquin Valley.  but back to the water issue.  i want to know what your take is on CARB making farmers waste hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day....enough water for the city of bakersfield and all of its residence for 10 days, according to this askville.amazon.com/water-average-household-consu me/AnswerViewer.do

you say that the state is in a drought, yet government agencies with non elected officials that cannot be held acocuntable (read CARB) have no problem carrying out a non-science-based agenda that MAKES the farmers waste hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day?

kinda sounds like the do as i say-not as i do issue to me

I'm in agreement about the wasted landscaping water here in Bakersfield.  People in the landscaping business locally will tell you that we over water our lawns here.  On the Garden Party radio show they tells us the best time to water is dawn so that our watering can piggyback the dew form the night and more of the sprinkler water is retained.  They also say that watering every day benefits the weeds more than the lawn, and weeds have shallow roots and love that daily watering.

When grandson moved into his new house with no back yard, I googled all kinds of information on starting and maintaining lawns.  All the sites said the same thing.  We use WAY too much water on a green patch of ground.  Over the summer I watered the back yard well about once a week and it grew like crazy in spite of it's lack of water.  I watered the front about twice a week.  I stopped watering completely about two weeks ago when the Bermuda stated to go dormant.

Theoretically, the crabgrass should die with the cold (it doesn't) so I don't intend to encourage it by continuing to water through the winter.  Bermuda is hardy and will come back anyway.  In by neighborhood, on any given day, you'll see water running in the gutter.  Since there's a slight slope, sometimes it's runs by my house at a pretty good clip.

Farmer use a lot of water granted, but we eat a lot of food grown by them.  Cutting off water to the farmers does not make sense.  Cutting back on watering non edible lawns DOES make sense.

learnem, pardon my ignorance regarding what the California Air Resources Board does with water on farm roads. I cannot find any mention of the rules pertaining to that practice in some of the overview links I looked at, and don't want to spend a week reading regulations. I will take you at your word this is an archaic band-aid practice that really does not help all that much and potentially wastes water.

I do know that this state is keenly invested in getting better efficiencies from water usage everywhere, and that agriculture is a huge component of this effort. I also realize huge strides have been made in changing over from gravity flow/flood types of irrigation with tremendous wastes of resources to drip and sprinkler system usages over the past two decades. The amount of acreage committed to dip is now approximately %50 of water allocations devoted to farms. Drip and sprinkler use now make up  half  the irrigation use. This is a 33% decrease in gravity/flood use and an increase in roughly the same percentile for automated drip and sprinkler use.

Most Californians recognize the need to conserve and create better efficiencies of water use. We still are in the midst of a drought, and the drought is not man made. The peculiarity of uses and strains on the distribution of this resource are man made. I believe this county and this city need to both do a better job of pitching in to help manage our resources better. I believe our local government has been negligent in this effort.

Thanks again for your good comments.

The water company could always take the PG&E route, jack up the rates so people feel the pinch in their pocketbooks to conserve. Somehow I think that would be better received down here (in terms of being more likely to be followed, not lack of verbal complaints because there would be many). I suspect a watering ban would be about as effect as the burn bans... that is, not at all effective because so many here seem to flaunt laws they don't like. Just look around at how many fireplaces are going in mid-winter on burn ban days and how few get cited over it. But if the cost per CCF of water were a couple of dollars (it's actually less than a buck right now), people might actually start conserving.

vaughn water has already jacked their rates up by almost half of what they were a year ago....and their water, read more minerals, has gotten worse....