Letters to the Editor 10-22-15

Good use of taxpayer dollars
Editor: Many appreciations to the City Council and water department for setting up the Recycled Water Program for residential landscape use. It’s an intelligent and practical approach to a very real, unwanted and unfortunate problem, namely the drought. The program is an admirable use of taxpayer funds. Taxpayers pay high service fees for all water related uses, including the new plant, and instead of releasing hundreds of thousands of treated waste water into the river it is repurposed again for landscaping and other uses.
In our case the primary use of the treated water is to save 19 mature trees planted on our property in 1994 and 2000. The subterranean ground is drying deeper so tap roots are stressing, if not dying. Some of the trees received their water from the sprinkler system, however that was stopped in 2013, reducing water use by over 50 percent.
This is good but the lawn looks like a scene from Mad Max. When one considers the loss of time, energy (I dug every hole and put in the lawn) and the multiple thousands of hours and dollars spent, it’s disheartening to witness their slow surrender to an unpleasant death. The double whammy arrives after the demise of your wonderland landscaping is when you have to again spend the precious discretionary hours removing the decay and possibly replacing it with an unpleasant and undesirable landscape. Again, thanks to the forward thinking of the city and kudos to the staff manning the filling stations, who are efficient at their jobs and just nice people.
And, many thanks for the Roy Rogers band in the Plaza this summer.
Kevin J. McCann
Healdsburg