National Alliance For Healthy Communities

By Tilde Herrera, GreenBiz.com

Six companies that collectively manage nearly 1 million vehicles have joined President Barack Obama’s new program aimed at making the nation’s largest private fleets more fuel efficient.

In joining the National Clean Fleets Partnership, Coca-Cola, Enterprise Holdings, General Electric, Osram Sylvania, Ryder and Staples will identify, test, adopt and share fuel reduction strategies and technologies. Already the new partners have a deep bench of collective practices to draw from, including extensive deployment of alternative fuel vehicles.

“It will give us the ability to expand beyond our role in advancing natural gas to look at other technologies, specifically electric,” said Scott Perry, Ryder’s group director of vehicle supply management. “We think there’s going to definitely be a focus on that and being able to play a broader role in educating our customers, vehicle technology development and infrastructure, and broader market and industry awareness.”

read the full article here on GreenBiz.com

The Los Angeles Board of Public Works selected Green Conversion Systems (GCS) to design and build its new commercial-scale energy-from-waste facility.

GCS is the sole U.S. licensee of the leading European technology — Advanced Thermal Recycling — that is the standard for energy-from-waste facilities in the European Union.

This selection concludes a four-year technology evaluation process by the Bureau of Sanitation and its engineering consultant, HDR, a waste management technology company, to identify the most sustainable waste-management solution. The city reviewed proposals from 13 vendors before selecting GCS.

Read more …

In 1892, John Muir and a number of his supporters founded the Sierra Club to, in Muir’s words, “do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.” Muir served as the Club’s president until his death in 1914. Read more about the history of the Sierra Club.

Today, the Sierra Club has over 1.3 million members and supporters and is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. Find out more about the Sierra Club.

The advice to “climb the mountains and get their good tidings” has been followed by Sierra Club members since the organization’s start, and the pursuit of this goal has played a key role in shaping the Club’s history… Continue reading on The Sierra Club website ….

In the US, tires are scrapped at a rate of 1.1 tires per person per year. Leading to over 300 million tires scrapped each year. Landfill space is becoming more and more scarce as tires do not biodegrade and have significant negative space. Tires also pose a significant environmental threat and contributes to toxic waste.

NAFHC was delighted to see that reRubber is committed towards the best green practices in the industry, utilizing state of the art equipment to drive down the use of electricity, materials and produces zero-waste from their operations. Their guarantee to the planet and it’s people is to recycled 100% of your scrap tires.

Despite some misconceptions associated with scrap tires, they remain to be one of the few recycled products that perform better than conventional materials used today. There are case studies available to compare both price and performance of recycled rubber products verses other conventional products. There are exciting new developments in surfacing, flooring, roofing, traffic safety and asphalt.

One of reRubber’s line can recycle up to 1,000,000 passenger tire equivalents per year, with capability to scale easily as supply and demand increases. Therefore one line can produce 7,200 tons of rubber, 3,250 tons of nylon and 1,650 tons of steel per year.

Lead by CEO & President – JD Wang, a true eco friendly visionary, reRubber has evolved from crumb rubber processor to rubber technology innovator. Working together with companies like Hyperseal, reRubber is changing the way we see crumb rubber, it is no longer just grind up product from a tire, but an important ingredient in the next generation of low coast, green, coating products.

reRubber made to the top-20 list of tire recyclers, and also received Special Congregational Recognition from Congressman Joe Baca.

The National Alliance for Healthy communities is committed to Green Living. Average US families are spending more every year to cool down their living or working environment. A good alternative to cooling by running more air conditioning, is to apply special environment friendly coating to the building structure and keep the heat out.

Inventor Colonel Ronald Savin, United States Air Force (Ret.) is a chemical engineer noted for the formulation of over 400 commercial paints and coatings. Col. Savin holds over 20 patents in the field and is the inventor and owner of Hyperseal, Inc. While in retirement in 2006, Col. Savin invented a revolutionary method of formulating hollow glass into regular acrylic paint using specialized silica and cellulose additives. He patented the method, branded it Hyperglass and Hyperflex Caulk and incorporated Hyperseal, Inc.

Hyperseal products includes 50% or more recycled crumb rubber in the coating. Its special formula features extremely low VOCs, fast dry time, water based, water clean up, application temperature  at 45F-100F, and because it uses 50% or more recycled crumb rubber, it is very environment friendly.

HyperCaulk – A brand new easy to use rubber caulk for concrete and asphalt. It is a self-leveling pourable material that easily fills cracks in roofs, driveways, parking lots, and more. It is paint-able, waterproof, and lasts longer than typical heavy duty crack fillers.

Hyperflex Primer - Seals and repairs while insulating and cooling. Hyperflex Primer is a highly durable coating made from recycled rubber that has been developed to protect and insulate surfaces such as roofs, siding, interior walls and wooden, metal or plastic outdoor furniture.

Hyperglass® Cool Top Coat – has been shown to drastically decrease surface temperature, decreasing your carbon dioxide emissions and decreasing the cost of cooling your home by up to 50%. It is a non-toxic, non-carcinogenic, elastomeric coating that has been formulated with high-quality glass microspheres. The infusion of the glass microspheres nearly doubles the reflective properties of white paint alone – as well as making it extremely durable, water-resistant, and lighter than regular paints.

Easy to use

Spray, Brush or Roll – Because of it’s unique patented design the Hyperseal System is able to be applied by anyone who can use a paint brush and is as durable and flexible as any rubber roof membrane when it cures. It can be easily applied to nearly any roof substrate or design. No expert knowledge nor special equipment are required. And routine maintenance is as easy as spray washing and touching up with a paint brush.

Clean & Green

The patented system is able to take a non-toxic, non-carcinogenic acrylic coating and infuses recycled rubber and glass to create a durable and totally waterproof rubber/glass matrix to seal and insulate the roof while cooling and reflecting. It is extremely resistant to environmental damage as well as scrubbing from routine cleaning.

Cities across California are excited about the energy and maintenance savings potential of LED street lights. Lighting manufacturers across the nation, the Department of Energy, and state and local customers to help bring this technology to market.

Financial incentives for metered customer-owned street lights will follow at a later date, as will incentives for other types of outdoor LED lighting.

Key advantages of quality LED street lights include:

* Improved night visibility due to higher color rendering, higher color temperature and increased illuminance uniformity
* Significantly longer lifespan
* Lower energy consumption
* Reduced maintenance costs
* Instant-on with no run-up or re-strike delays
* No mercury, lead or other known disposable hazards
* Lower environmental footprint
* An opportunity to implement programmable controls (e.g. bi-level lighting)

Recycling of tires in asphalt pavement is an idea that has proven as resilient as rubber itself. Yet in the approximately 50 years since first being tried, the idea has failed to revolutionize the United States paving industry.

That could change.

New technology and old concerns about the environment seem to be re-energizing the rubber asphalt revolution.

The primary obstacles to more widespread reuse of tires in asphalt have been relatively high cost and uniform testing processes that tend to work against rubber asphalt while standards for highway projects are set.

These fundamental barriers to acceptance have been offset to some extent by repeated demonstrations in the United States and abroad that rubber asphalt holds up well under heavy traffic and absorbs the weight of passing vehicles in a way that reduces freeway noise. And the indisputable advantage of rubber asphalt is that it recycles tires that otherwise are piling up in landfills and ditches.

Federal and state environmental agencies are on the side of anyone wanting to reuse tires in new pavement. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency promotes the concept in the Resource Conservation Challenge section of its Web site. Noting that rubber asphalt is the single biggest user of crumb rubber (12 million tires a year), the agency lists the benefits of the rubberized asphalt – “longer lasting road surfaces, reduced road maintenance, cost effectiveness over the long term, lower road noise and shorter braking distances.”

Mobility over the years has changed. The advantages of new technology has contributed to the change. Today “being mobile” can mean simply having wireless access or a cell phone.

The challenge has become cost service access.

First, the need. Cell phones have become a necessary service to voice and data. To a great extent a life line for 911 service emergencies. The challenge has become service reception. In many areas of the country there is no service. This can be due to the restrictions on large communication towers or “cells”, or simply the geographic nature of the terrain (tunnels, mountains, valleys, rural areas, subways, etc). Now there is technology that can bring service that is reliable to challenged regions through loss of small senders or repeaters. This allows for hikers, those in rural communities, mountains and subways to be able to communicate at all times…emergency, personal or professional. As an example, in Washington DC the subway was involved in an accident. Due to the lack of cell services, first responders went to a wrong location at first. With the new technology in place this could have been prevented.

Second, the cost. The costs are mostly in construction and not in service, so the consumer bill does not reflect any significant cost for services.

The key is public safety and the need has become greater since the events of 9-11. If for no other reason then our own security and ability to be in touch at all times, it is vital that we support the technology both as consumers and as government.

The National Alliance for Healthy Communities, with the support of think tank City Solutions, has compiled significant information on the issues and how to address them. The information is available for transit agencies, local, state and federal governments.

Health-Care Cuts Could Shift Costs
Private Sector May Face Greater Burden, Economists Say

President Obama’s plan to rein in federal spending on health care could end up shifting costs to the private sector, economists say.

Unless doctors and hospitals are able to respond to the government cuts by becoming more efficient, the result could be higher costs for insurers, employers, and people with private medical coverage, they say.

Historically, health-care spending has been a bit like a balloon: If it is squeezed in one place, it tends to bulge in another.

“I think there’s definitely risk that a portion of the reduction in hospital payments from Medicare will wind up as increased payments by private insurers,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change.
Depending on the circumstances, hospitals may have the motive and means to “transfer those charges to somebody else,” and “we’ll see costs increasing on the private side and not necessarily falling everywhere,” said Harold S. Luft, director of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute.

The biggest health-care proposal that Obama announced last weekend is especially likely to move costs to the private sector, because it would cut Medicare payments without giving hospitals the tools to deliver care more cost-effectively, Luft said. The administration predicts that measure — adjusting Medicare payments to reflect productivity changes in the overall economy — would save the government $110 billion over 10 years.
Squeezing from the government’s end could make health care more efficient for everybody. “If you push on one side, you’re actually pushing on the whole thing,” said Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget.

But a report issued Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office portrayed that outcome as speculative. There is no guarantee that the health-care system’s response to pressure would be greater quality or efficiency, according to the CBO analysis.
Throwing cold water on hopes for effective health-care reform, the CBO described a variety of problems that could make it hard to slow federal spending on care — and to do so without putting quality at risk.
“At this point, experts do not know exactly how to structure such reforms so as to reduce federal spending on health care significantly in the long run without harming people’s health,” the CBO said.
“Examples of efficient care certainly exist today. . . . Yet applying the methods of those efficient providers throughout the health-care system cannot be accomplished through fiat or good intentions,” it added.
The challenge is that the administration and Congress are trying to extend medical coverage to the uninsured without increasing the federal budget deficit over the next decade. As a result, they are bound by the budgetary scoring process — meaning they must come up with solutions that can predictably and measurably reduce federal outlays.
Some steps that might prove cost-effective over the long run do not necessarily mean savings for the federal budget.

Conversely, some steps that save the government money would not necessarily translate into overall reductions in national health-care spending.
If Medicare cuts payments to hospitals but the costs of treating patients stay the same, “then you have the potential for cost-shifting,” said Kenneth E. Thorpe, a professor of health policy at Emory University. But Obama is trying to implement policies “that would lead to hospitals reducing their expenditures,” he said.

One of the president’s signature proposals would reward hospitals for reducing readmission rates and penalize hospitals whose patients must return for another stay because they did not receive adequate treatment the first time. That proposal is unlikely to create a bulge in private medical costs, because it would lead hospitals to change the way they function, Thorpe said. The administration is counting on improved readmission rates to save the government $25 billion over 10 years.

Not all hospitals would have the ability to foist additional costs onto the private sector. Those most likely to make up elsewhere for cuts in government payments are major hospitals that are essential to local health networks and therefore able to wield more market clout, Ginsburg said.

The consolidation of hospitals in many communities limits private insurers’ ability to push back.
Cutting payments by Medicare, the federal program for the elderly, is a relatively blunt instrument of reform.
“Imposing slower growth in [Medicare] payments would create ongoing pressure on providers to identify and adopt efficiencies; it would also, however, create risks for providers and patients if the efficiency gains were not achieved,” the CBO said.
Part of the problem is what the CBO described as the difficulty in measuring the quality of care. If quality cannot be gauged, it is hard to reward doctors and hospitals for delivering it — and it is hard to penalize them for not doing so.

Various popular ideas about how to save money have limitations and downsides, the CBO reported.

Increasing access to preventive care, for example, is widely considered a powerful way to reduce spending, but “one study of health and economic effects of preventive services found that only 20 percent of the services that were assessed yielded net financial savings,” it said. In some instances, the cost of delivering preventive care to a large population would actually exceed the savings on the relatively few people who avoided illness as a result, CBO said.

Similarly, improving public health can reduce Medicare spending on particular problems. However, helping people live longer and healthier lives can increase the burden they put on the federal government, partly because they will spend more time collecting Medicare and Social Security benefits, the CBO reported.

Every so often, America embarks on a project so audacious that it hardly seems possible. Prime examples: the top-secret Manhattan Project that made the first operable atomic bomb, the construction of the country’s interstate highway system starting in the 1950s, and President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to land men on the moon.

These government-sponsored projects often arise during times of political or economic duress, and so it is today with the $4.5 billion of seed money for a nationwide “smart electricity grid” inserted in the economic recovery package that was approved by Congress shortly after President Barack Obama took the oath.

The leadership is pinning much of its hopes for America’s long-term economic renewal on a nationwide, interconnected system of smart electricity meters and sensors that would increase energy efficiency, reliability, and also encourage “green” technologies like wind and solar generation and hybrid cars.

It won’t be an easy feat. There are parallels between the country’s attempt to build a new electricity network and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, said Jim Marston, Texas regional director of the Environmental Defense Fund.

“NASA knew where they were trying to get and they knew where they were, and so after the goal was announced, they spent a little while figuring out the path to get there. Shortly after that, they actually put the engineering on the ground,” Marston said.

Government’s Pivotal Role
The smart grid, Marston said, is still in the planning stage, but more smart grid test projects are under way at the local level, in places like Miami; Austin, Texas; Massachusetts; and Southern California. State and local governments have facilitated many of these projects in partnership with nonprofits or technology vendors.

In April, Miami launched a $200 million smart grid project called Energy Smart Miami, with the goal of connecting almost all homes and businesses in Miami-Dade County to a smart grid by 2011. The project is being driven by the Florida Power & Light utility company, supported by General Electric and Cisco Systems. Much of the project will be funded by Obama’s economic stimulus package.

Massachusetts is signing off on a few communities’ smart grid pilots, which are mandated by the state’s 2008 Green Communities Act. In one such test, 15,000 smart meters will be installed in homes in Worcester, Mass., by National Grid, a London-based electricity generator.

In Austin, Texas, the municipally owned utility company will finish deploying smart meters to the city’s homes later this year. And a public-private initiative that includes the City Council has been formed to study how to best use the smart meters to transform Austin’s energy infrastructure.

And Southern California Edison, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., will install 5 million smart meters in its coverage area by 2012. Edison estimates that the smart meters will save peak power consumption that’s the equivalent of one big power plant. The move toward smart grid is being motivated by California’s renewable energy portfolio standard that requires electricity companies to get at least 20 percent of the power they distribute from renewable sources by 2010.

What’s a Smart Grid?
Though regulators, politicians, vendors and environmentalists haven’t come to a consensus on what exactly constitutes a smart grid, one of its core features will be “smart” electricity meters that integrate IT. Smart meters will be installed in homes, businesses and public buildings
- virtually anywhere there’s a wall socket. Known in the power industry as “advanced metering infrastructure,” a smart meter sends a constant stream of data back to the utility companies.

From the distribution side of the equation, a smart grid would give utilities much greater control, and the ability to minimize power outages and catastrophic failures. Many utility companies today don’t have the IT on their grid to automatically detect where power is knocked out. Th
ey still rely on phone calls from affected customers. In addition, the smart grid would eliminate manual meter reading, which means no more trips into residents’ backyards. In the future, an interconnected web of sensors could monitor the electricity grid and solve load-balancing issues and other problems before they cause an outage.

“They could actually do switching of the network remotely to first identify the outage, then switch around the outage, thereby lessening the number of people who are affected by the outage,” said Guerry Waters, vice president of marketing and strategies for Oracle’s Utilities Global Business Unit. “Understanding where that needs to occur and being able to do it quite rapidly would be advantageous to the electric industry.”

From the consumer side, homeowners would conceivably save on their bills via a new class of products that would rely on two-way communication. Today a refrigerator can’t “speak” to the electricity grid – communication, therefore, is only one way. But someday, powered by the grid’s intelligence, a washing machine or thermostat could be programmed to only turn on when citywide demand is lowest. This could be achieved by redesigning the appliance itself or installing “smart plugs” at electrical sockets.

To make this new consumption model profitable, utility companies might adopt what are called “demand response” pricing models that charge users more per kilowatt-hour during peak demand and less when the electrical grid isn’t burdened. Utility companies are already testing several prototypes of online, Web-based dashboards that give homeowners a near real-time look at how much electricity each appliance in their home is consuming, and the ability to turn appliances on and off based on that information.

A utility company itself could also turn off infrastructure in a home, and the possibilities extend beyond electricity, Waters said. “One that was very clear that [Oracle] talked about to the municipal water groups was leak detection. The other would be the ability to do automatic remote connects or disconnects, or restrictions on the water. … The last one is having prepaid metering.” Smart metering could also identify water abusers during droughts, he said.

In the long term, the smart grid is also expected to help electricity generators make better use of renewable energy, like wind power and solar panels. The world’s heightened awareness of global warming – and America’s political will to cut down on imported oil – is expected to open up the proverbial floodgates for renewable energy. The U.S. economic stimulus package, by itself, is expected to spur an installed national capacity of wind power that’s 67 percent greater than it would otherwise have been, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The issue at hand is that in the future, electricity generation is expected to be more decentralized and intermittent than it’s traditionally been, when the bulk of electricity came from huge coal-fired power plants and nuclear reactors. Wind farms and solar panel arrays will be sprinkled across the country, and the smart grid will efficiently manage an electricity supply that’s incoming from all directions, which isn’t possible today.

Also, since wind and solar are intermittent power sources – they can start and stop abruptly – the smart grid would give utilities much-needed data about where the sun and wind is, so they could make informed decisions about when to fire up a backup power plant to meet peak demand.

And if hybrid cars and electric vehicles ever hit the streets en masse, they could plug into the grid, too.

Finally the smart grid would be built on an IT backbone via hardware and software contained in sensors. Affixed to key junctures, like transformers and substations, these sensors would collect data and quickly correct potential problems. It remains to be seen if this information would be transmitted over power lines, proprietary-use networks, wireless technology or the Internet, Waters said.

“Today there is actually two-way communications going on in the electrical grid, but it’s usually over some very protected circuitry and communications that are guarded very closely,” he said. “So the idea now is that the utility industry will open up to have one common way to communicate with all the devices of the smart grid.”

So in its simplest form, the smart grid will be composed of smart electricity meters, sensors and a grid that draws power from a system of generators that’s more decentralized than it is today. The trick will be building that system atop today’s antiquated grid, which can’t be discarded outright because it can’t be turned off.

Old and Always On

If Thomas Edison, who’s credited with inventing centralized distribution of electricity, were to travel from his era in the early 1900s and arrive at present, he’d probably recognize many components of the modern-day U.S. electricity grid, writes author Nicholas Carr, in his newest book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. On the other hand, Edison’s contemporary Alexander Graham Bell – who invented the telephone – would be baffled by modern-day telecommunications.

“The interesting thing is that, by and large, the electricity grid in the U.S. is kind of the last of the ancient industries that has not yet been completely revamped,” Tony Erickson, global utilities director for EDS, a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard. “So this whole concept of smart grid is something that people have been talking about for 20 years, but we’re just now kind of getting there.”

In other words, the electricity grid is like a 100-year-old legacy system that’s been left in the dust by telecom and the Internet. But it’s not as cut-and-dry as replacing an old computer system, because turning off the electricity grid isn’t an option and large-scale power outages can’t be tolerated. When the Northeast Blackout of 2003 struck the Eastern seaboard and left 50 million people in the dark, the biggest power outage in North America’s history cost the economy at least $6 billion.

The power industry and government regulators recognize that coming quickly to agreement on standards for the smart grid’s equipment and IT will speed its construction, Erickson said. But the country can’t wait for those standards to be written, Erickson said, because by the time they’re approved, the technology – the smart grid – would be outdated.

“Several communities and organizations – government, private and commercial – are forming [smart grid] standards boards, and just like the battle between the Blu-ray and [high-definition] DVD format war, we’ll see which ones win out,” Erickson said. “Eventually I’m confident we will have open standards, because those standards will be what spur entrepreneurial people to create the technology that’s going to help us drive this thing forward. So we’re kind of building it in-flight, and we have to keep the lights on while we do this.”

In the meantime, communities like Austin are launching their own smart grid projects.

In December, a coalition that included the Austin City Council; Austin Energy, the city-owned utility company; the University of Texas; the city’s chamber of commerce; and the Environmental Defense Fund announced the Pecan Street Project, an initiative to redesign every facet of Austin’s energy infrastructure. A main focus of the project will be to figure out how to take advantage of Austin’s smart meters.

The project will attempt to add more distributed renewable energy in Austin than currently exists elsewhere in the U.S., dramatically reduce the amount of energy that’s consumed, and shift the energy that’s consumed to be more coincident to the time that renewable energy is available. In addition, Marston said the stakeholders want to create a new business model that will allow electric companies to thrive – rather than just survive – in an environment in which less electricity is being sold, and distributors own less of the electricity that’s being used.

“A big part of the project is smart grid, but it’s not only smart grid. It’s smart appliances, smart plugs as well as smart meters,” Marston said. “The idea is we will use all of these technologies to dramatically reduce and shift load, and use consumer choice and even real-time rates to help that work.”

The government side is what makes the project possible, he said.

“The municipal utility company, Austin Energy, is fairly unique because the board of directors is the City Council, so it’s the same folks who also do land-use planning, zoning and building codes,” Marston said. “So I think many of the things we’ll be doing will not be directly at the utility, but putting a building code in, for example, that says all new homes, with a few exceptions, will have to have solar hot water heaters in them. For instance, we’ll probably say all new parking garages in them will have to have discharging for plug-in hybrids.”

For many city councils, the price of democracy is that moment of peak fatigue, after deliberations have gone on too deliberately. A rule of thumb, when the meeting goes late, the quality of discussion is not great.

For that reason, many city councils have rules that put a fence around how late a meeting can go. Tempers were short and angry words were exchanged when a recent Berkeley meeting went past midnight and more members of the public wanted to be heard on the topic of a draft of a city’s Climate Action Plan. At the end of the meeting, bleary council members were unsure if they were voting on a resolution to extend the voting on amendments to the Climate Action Plan.

Most California cities wrestle at one time or another with the proper way to close discussion and vote on issues before council members become punchy. Often this is expressed by putting a time limit on speakers. Most cities have a three- or five-minute limit on speakers. In Berkeley, this limit is two minutes.

At one time Berkeley council meetings started with a “lottery” in which five people’s names were drawn out of a drum, out of all who wished to speak on non-public hearing matters. After some people objected, the city received a legal opinion that the method was illegal. If less than 10 residents have signed up to speak, they get two minutes each. If it’s more than 10, they get one minute.

The Berkeley council policy guide has this rule:

No council meeting shall continue past 11:00 pm unless a two-thirds majority of the Council votes to extend the meeting to discuss specified any motion to extend the meeting beyond 11:00 pm shall include a list of specific agenda items to be covered and shall specify in which order items shall be handled.

Sometimes it’s enough just to raise awareness.

After three years of drought that has left the state’s biggest reservoirs well below capacity, water agencies up and down the state are using methods to cajole customers into conserving California’s most precious commodity. The Association of California Water Agencies reports that 62 agencies statewide have implemented voluntary conservation measures and 32 have imposed mandatory water restrictions. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which accounts for a third of the state’s water supply, stands at 66 percent of normal.

The two biggest reservoirs in the state, Shasta and Oroville, are well below their average storage at 76 and 71 percent, respectively. Water purveyors around the state are spending millions of dollars convincing their customers that they need to conserve water. Some are issuing for blatant water wasting and many are imposing drought rates that discourage high usage. In most cases, consumers are getting the message.

In Los Angeles, water conservation teams in clearly marked cars patrol the streets on the lookout for water wasters, the thoughtless few who and when they aren’t supposed to or flooding the gutter by overspraying. Violators get a warning the first time – but after that could be hit with a ticket. Repeat offenders could be dinged up to $600 for ignoring previous warning.

So far, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s 3.8 million customers have cut back by 5 percent of their water use, still short of the percent goal. Starting June 1, outdoor irrigation will be limited to Mondays and Thursdays with no watering allowed between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.. The rate system will reward customers who conserve and penalize those who don’t. “We have no choice but to make conserving water the law,” says Nahai, the CEO and general manager of the LADWP. “Cutting back on water use is now our civic duty.”

In the Northern California city of Novato, customers served by the North Marin Water District who are caught washing down the sidewalk, no automatic shutoff on their hoses or overwatering, are issued a warning. If the violation isn’t corrected in a reasonable amount of time, their service is disconnected and it will cost them $100 to have it reconnected. A second violation results in a $200 reconnection charge and a flow restrictor on their service.

Among the areas hardest hit by a third of drought is the San Joaquin Valley, where many farmers rely on the state and federal water projects for deliveries. The Westlands Water District, which serves 600,000 acres of farmland in Fresno and Kings counties, will receive just 10 percent of what it normally gets from the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the Central Valley Water Project.

What that means for the district’s farmers is more expensive water, fields and more pressure on an already over-drawn groundwater system. Westlands spokesperson Sarah Woolf said even if the bureau increases water allocations in the coming weeks, it wouldn’t help farmers this year.

The drastic reduction in water deliveries from the Central Valley Project has forced farmers to greatly increase groundwater pumping, which has set off environmental impacts. The district has yet to take criminal action against any of its customers.

In L.A., the DWP has issued 3,600 citations in the past year for water wasters. A second citation results in a monetary fine. One district used a combination of higher rates and a vigorous public outreach campaign to coax its customers into conserving water. The East Bay Municipal Utilities District cut their water use by 13 percent after the district’s 1.3 million customers opted out of the drought emergency.

All those conservation efforts won’t prevent water rates from increasing for the district’s customers, however. Because of the great job of conserving water, EBMUD’s customers will face a 7.5 percent rate increase later this summer. As water sales drop, so do revenues for water districts, which rely on water sales for a lot of their budgets. But, the agencies have a high percentage of fixed costs for overhead and labor, and the sales deficit must be made up somewhere.

Two groups targeting California politics for extreme makeovers have made enhancing revenue streams for local government a focal point of the argument for supporting drastic change.

California Forward and the Bay Area Council both think the state has fallen into a rut, dressing the same tired budgeting tricks in tacky clothes and parading it around like a new solution.

They want a transformation starting at the city and county level, but they are selling different paths to slimming down big government-style budgeting.

“We need to move government closer to the people,” said Robert Hertzberg, former Democratic speaker of the state Assembly and now California Forward co-chair, at a Sacramento Press Club lunch while on a multi-media promotional tour.

California Forward (www.caforward.org), a bipartisan group funded largely by foundations, wants to change the way budgeting works in California.

The group started with a legislative study group to improve state spending plans and hopes to convince the legislature to put proposals for tax reform on the 2010 or 2012 ballot.

“We want to restore flexibility for local governments by giving them more control over their budgets,” explained Jim Mayer, California Forward executive director.

How much flexibility?

“They should have authority over raising and lowering taxes and managing programs. The state’s role is to set minimum standards and then let cities and counties – counties in particular – decide how to provide services.”

Allowing councils and boards of supervisors to decide whether to move some law enforcement funds into social services or the other way around based on the city’s individual situation and administrator preferences can be a compelling argument.

The Bay Area Council (www.bayareacouncil.org), another bi-partisan group, funded mainly by business, has called for a Constitutional Convention to overhaul the budget process and wants to put the idea to a statewide vote as early as 2010.

Last year, the group hired Oakland-based Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin & Associates to conduct a poll on public attitudes toward the idea.

Of the 800 people interviewed, 82 percent said the state is headed in the wrong direction.

Almost that many (80 percent) were extremely, very seriously or somewhat seriously concerned with how the state collects and distributes funds to local governments and schools.

Of the specific reforms polled for possible inclusion in the ballot initiative, the one that received the most support was the local control question.

Pollsters asked if the respondents would support “permitting local governments to keep locally collected taxes instead of sending them to Sacramento and having them redistributed back to local governments.” A total of 68 percent responded positively.

“More locally-collected funds should stay local,” concluded John Grubb, Bay Area Council senior vice president of external affairs.

How either of these groups will specifically make that happen will have to wait until the big reveal, probably after the May special election results show just how bad the state is in need of a new ‘do.

Please note, statements and opinions expressed are solely those of their respective authors and may not represent the views of The National Alliance for Healthy Communities or its employees thereof. The National Alliance for Healthy Communities is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information.