Two Steps Forward

There is a healthy debate surrounding The Express News Group’s annual list of “Water Hogs,” the somewhat inelegant moniker given to the South Fork’s biggest residential consumers of water. Is it an effort to shame the Suffolk County Water Authority’s “super users”? Or a reasonable effort to inform the authority’s other customers of the property owners who are doing far less to preserve water, especially at a moment when all 1.2 million customers are subject to a Stage 1 Water Alert calling for conservation?

Either way, the focus should be on what needs to happen — and that is clearly that so-called super users absolutely must be made aware of their status, and they must be encouraged to take action. The SCWA doesn’t actually do that (the list is not theirs, it’s ours), but there are two steps it definitely should take.

Currently, the SCWA has a two-tiered system when charging for water: It’s about $2.50 per 1,000 gallons at first, and goes up to about $3.60 per 1,000 gallons after a certain usage point, which varies based on the size of a meter. Most residential customers would have to use about 90,000 gallons of water in a three-month period — well over twice the average household’s rate of use — to begin paying for water at the higher rate.

It’s time to get super users’ attention in a very simple way: Add a third tier. It can kick in at, say, 500,000 gallons per quarter — which, to be clear, is a rate no reasonable individual homeowner will ever reach: It amounts, in one quarter, to about three years of normal usage. Set that rate significantly higher — $6 per 1,000 gallons, or even $10 per $1,000 gallons, above that point.

Is that meant to be punitive? Only to a point. The truth is, it’s very expensive to have to provide millions of gallons of water a year to a single property on the South Fork. That means spending on infrastructure. So this is an effort to collect enough revenue to offset the added expense. Will it potentially catch the attention of estate owners by hitting their bottom line? We can only hope so.

The other measure is a simple one: The SCWA banned new open-loop geothermal systems, which use an astounding amount of water, back in July 2020; only closed-loop systems may be connected to the authority’s pipes. It’s now time to end the grandfathering of the old systems (which, it must be noted, are perfectly acceptable, and even environmentally sound, when supplied by private wells).

Suffolk County officials should eliminate the use of these systems when attached to public water, as part of the county’s ongoing focus on water quality. Wasting millions of gallons of treated water cannot be condoned, and in fact should be legislated away. Towns and villages, likewise, should take coordinated action to eliminate the practice altogether before we reach a point where low water pressure starts to affect local fire departments battling blazes.

With those two steps, super users might still make the list every year, but it’s going to be a much more exclusive list — one that nobody will really want to make.