Woodbury to use audits to ask biggest water users: "Why so much?"

J Adams is dumb wrote:

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We should care about how much water that these rich irresponsible people wasted. They can afford to pay the bill but their wasting on water does affect other people living in the city and it is the responsibility of the city to control and monitor the amount of the water that these people are wasting. If you are so opposed to the government's intervention then don't put your seat belt on when you are driving as the law has required. After all it is your life and who care if you crash and die in a car accident. People like you that do not want any government's intervention is not that valuable anyway to the society and we don't need that kind of people. Sucker.

Next we will make them use mercury laden compact florescent light bulbs-wait we are already doing that.

This report of their wastefulness and greed and selfishness should be an embarassment for people in Woodbury. Water supplies have to last not only for us....but for our children, grandchildren. Save the earth folks! Or haven't they heard about thinking green? Why does government have to tell us to conserve...we must not be the brightest light on the block if we can't figure it out for ourselves. They should be ashamed.

It’s incredulous that people think because it can be paid for they have a RIGHT (an entitlement mentality) to use how much ever they want regardless of the harm to anyone else.

Water (like food) is not a commodity that you can choose to have or not have. It needs to be clean and accessible. Using it wastefully is selfish (entitlement mentality again). Monitoring useage alleviates over-useage.

If you think some of these posts are making too much out of using too much water, read the newspaper. Daily there are articles about water shortages in the U.S.

And those who post about government infringement on water useage, you think government is worthless anyhow thus nullifying your posts.

Time magazine is doing their cover story comparing WWII to the global warming threat.....good grief-I am so tired about hearing about this going green crap. It is so overblown!

I never water the lawn. I cut the grass twice a summer, maybe three times. I water my garden by hand, sometimes with a sprinkler with a timer on it during long dry periods. I really don't get the bizarre reasoning that leads to excessive lawn watering and chemical usage. Why in God's name would anyone want to encourage a lawn to grow just in order to mow it? I always offer my friends that bitch about mowing their lawn the helpful advice that I can assist with a little Roundup(and yes, I understand Roundup is a chemical).

jpberka in Saint Paul wrote:

Of course they could afford the $50 sensor. Frankly, this is just pure selfishness. The water they're using is completely unnecessary for their needs, but they do nothing to curb the situation. Maybe they should be assessed directly on their taxes for the new well that will be required. It seems that while the rest of us are putting out water barrels and setting up low-flow systems, water-wasters need to take a greater responsibility. Maybe we're not hitting them hard enough in the pocket book.

Here's the irony...it's OK to use billions of gallons of water to make ethanol that also uses more energy to produce than we get from it. But it's not OK for someone to recycle the water from the city's water table to the city's water table as a money making service to residents.

Bitch is allowed on TV and radio. Why not the Pioneer Press forum? I can write it b-tch and it makes it on the site just fine.

A TRUE conservative would find the wastefulness of the water more disconcerting than the justified intervention of the local government. After all, the first step was a "kindly" visit to help the homeowner reassess their water usage, not a draconian trip to the gulag.
What has happened to personal responsibility?! Throwing out red herrings like "kids are starving in Haiti" are so off base in the context of this conversation. Next time I do something equally irresponsible, like dump a couple hundred pounds of fertilizer in a nearby lake, I'll remember to tell my angry neighbors, hey, think of the orphans in China.

The state legislature needs to get involved in this water debacle. We need to implement a state-wide tax of at least $1 per gallon of water used. This new tax would accomplish many things. First of all it would result in water conservation so there is more water to use in the manufacture of ethanol (takes 5 gallons of water for each gallon of ethanol produced). Next, the money raised could be used for increasing the subsidy on ethanol to encourage even more production to use the extra water that will be available. Any funds left over could be invested in even more LRT lines and high speed rail to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Miami and Mexico so people can more easily reach our state to apply for welfare and to visit their cousins who have been forced to relocate here due to law enforcement harassment. We need to do all of this for the children as it really does take a village to raise them. If there is other money left over, it could be used to capture feral cats and sterilize them and release them back into the wild as they were born free and deserve to live free.

Randy wrote:

It matters because the city has to dig a new well and build a new water tower so clowns like this can have pretty green grass. So what if they're willing to pay for water? It isn't just the water hogs who are paying for it, it's everyone who has to pay for water and has to pay more to increase the capacity. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Then the problem here is water rates may not be reflecting the actual costs of water. The dirty little secret Woodbury( and all other cities that have seperate water utilities don't advertise) is the fact that the more water used, the more funds generated. Like the electric utilities, they want you to use as much as possible- it's 'when' you use it that is sometimes a problem. That's why you get odd/ even day watering restrictions, instead of outright watering bans... it causes more water to be consumed, just on a more predictable(and managable) schedule. Woodbury perhaps needs to examine it's rate structure. I'm guessing that like most places, there is a fee structure that promotes usage- i.e., the more units used, the cheaper each unit.

Does anyone know how much water was on this planet 10 million years ago as compared to now?
How much water have we wasted?

Let's just say maybe you house catches on fire and there is no water supply to put it out because some snobbish woodbury owner needs to keep his grass green. They should be paying the higher price.

Al Franken wrote:

Time magazine is doing their cover story comparing WWII to the global warming threat.....good grief-I am so tired about hearing about this going green crap. It is so overblown!

This wasting of water has nothing to do with global warming. You are so dumb and off base to link this issue with global warming. Sucker.

highland guy wrote:

Last I checked, no Ethanol plants in Woodbury.

Last I checked, the ethanol plants got their water from the same source as Woodbury does.....

government has given us high food prices(corn ethonal being used for fuel not food) and high fuel prices(cant drill for oil)

great!!!

John A wrote:

<quoted text> First of all, the water a city pumps from aquafirs is not an endless supply; wells can run dry. They are very expensive to maintain, re-drill, and construct. Water towers are expensive as well. Another problem with water waste is fire protection. If a city's waterworks is excessively taxed and there's a structure fire, there won't be enough water/water pressure to put it out.
Conservation isn't a bad thing. Like many aspects of our society some people can't regulate themselves- operate in moderation- so government has to step in. I'm happy the city is going after idots such as this.

OVERALL water usage and conservation is a fine idea. But this story is about targeting individual super-users. The water "saved" can't be more that a drop in the bucket.

SallyMe wrote:

It’s incredulous that people think because it can be paid for they have a RIGHT (an entitlement mentality) to use how much ever they want regardless of the harm to anyone else.
Water (like food) is not a commodity that you can choose to have or not have. It needs to be clean and accessible. Using it wastefully is selfish (entitlement mentality again). Monitoring useage alleviates over-useage.
If you think some of these posts are making too much out of using too much water, read the newspaper. Daily there are articles about water shortages in the U.S.
And those who post about government infringement on water useage, you think government is worthless anyhow thus nullifying your posts.

What if this homeowner went to the Woodbury Sam's club and bought 10 pallets of bottled water to dump on this lawn? how will you stop him?

Its a free country.

You silly ninnies worried and hand-wringing over some homeowner in Woodbury using a lot of water on his lawn would be wise to consider this:

It takes 5 gallons of fresh water to make 1 gallon of Ethanol. Minnesota produced 550 million gallons of Ethanol last year.

Yes, that's right: 2.75 BILLION gallons of fresh, potable water (2,750,000,000 gallons) was wasted on Ethanol last year. Wow. look at all those zeros.

At least this guy's lawn is TRULY GREEN, unlike the flex-fuel farce that we are all paying for.

Do we live in China? What is the next consumer good they gov will want to audit ?

Just Me wrote:

Hey, these water users of 471000 gallons may have a new pool, and possibly during the summer a kid may have pooped in it, so they had to drain, clean and refill, maybe more than once.
As long as they are paying for the water, that should suffice. You can't blame the need to increase water storage for the city on users. Woodbury's growth is so rapid that was coming anyway.

Of all the potential scenarios, you go with poop in a pool. HAHAHAHAHA :-) You just never know!