By Sara Bridget Au, Editor, Insight Magazine

“It’s about winning that battle of perception of what’s important. For me, I’d much rather have water to drink than water to put on my grass.”

One day it’s possible our children may turn on the faucet and nothing will come out. While we are not technically in a drought at this moment, portions of the St. John’s River Water Management District (SJRWMD) have experienced lower than average rainfall, including Orange County which is four and a half inches behind projections for the year. April is annually designated by the state as Water Conservation Month.

“There are caps on the availability of sustainable ground water supplies – a limit on what’s available over the long term,” says James T. Gross, senior project manager at SJRWMD. “About half of the water an average homeowner consumes is for outdoor use, such as watering the lawn.”

The city of Oviedo is trying to get on the forefront of this issue by both creating alternative water sources like the $15 million reclaimed water system and curbing demand by instituting financial incentives to Xeriscape™. It’s a term, coined in Colorado, to describe creative ways of landscaping to conserve water.

“We’ll give people up to $1000 to tear out their lawns,” explains Oviedo Councilman Steve Henken. “Also, if they buy new appliances that don’t use as much water, such as low-flow toilets, they will get incentives. We’re not waiting until the problems happen here like what happened in Atlanta recently.”

The idea is to replace water-thirsty sod, often St. Augustine grass, with more water-efficient plants and thus greatly reduce the amount of water used by city residents. Oviedo is also limiting developers of new home sites to only use St. Augustine grass in 30% of the yard; the rest has to be covered with a low-water use lawn or other drought-resistant landscaping.

“It’s difficult to combat people’s expectations of what lawns should look like,” rues landscape designer Robert Martin of Alamar Services in Sanford.

He says that while St. Augustine grass can, over time, be trained to get by on lesser amounts of water, “But the average homeowner doesn’t have time to do the things [to make that happen].”

Martin recommends alternatives such as Bahia, Zoysia or Bermuda sod, but concedes they don’t have the same lush, succulent look of St. Augustine. Among all of those, he says, Zoysia is the best compromise, taking in less water than St. Augustine and being better looking than Bahia.

“It’s about winning that battle of perception of what’s important. For me, I’d much rather have water to drink than water to put on my grass.”

He mentions a potential plan to tier water rates in the future as being perhaps the only way the majority of residents will take conservation seriously. There could be one price for water until a predetermined level of consumption is reached, then the price goes up to the next level, and so forth. “If people start seeing a $500 water bill, they’ll change their habits,” says Martin.

Many homeowner associations specify lawn maintenance to current levels, and some even require St. Augustine grass, however Henken reports the ones he’s met with in Oviedo are all pretty positive about the city’s new rules. The biggest challenge, he says, is the cost and effort involved in changing an HOA’s bylaws. To get around that, they wrote into the ordinance language stating that city laws trump HOA regulations. “It took us years to get into this mess,” states Henken, “And it’ll take us years to get out of it, but we have a plan.”