Last week, we heard from Garfield Mayor Gary Blackburn about the town’s new solar-powered phone charger at Hamilton Park. He told us he thinks Garfield is on the cutting edge of reducing its carbon footprint. He said one prime example of that is how they monitor the city’s water usage.
“A couple of years ago, we started the process of reading all our water meters by telephone,” Blackburn said. “It used to be that we’d drive around the 300 meters every month, which took two and a half days. The truck was running the whole time while workers were getting out and reading water meters. Now, because of the technology this council approved purchasing, we read 95% of our water meters from the office.”
Blackburn credits the four aldermen, whom he said are forward-thinking.
“They are willing to put the effort into studying proposals like the solar charging station,” he said, “particularly for buying all of those electronic read meters to the tune of $100,000. They have the foresight to look down the road and recognize that we’re not just interested in today; we’re interested in five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road. When you get council members willing to put in the effort and make good decisions in the public interest, these are the kinds of things that happen.”
Blackburn said when he came into office nine years ago, it was not unusual to have up to 40% unaccounted-for water loss.
“Last month, our unaccounted-for water loss was 10.73%,” Blackburn said. “It’s down from 40% a few years ago, and that’s because of the hard work of our water guy. Because we can read meters electronically, we can see daily how much water we’re using. If he sees a spike, he goes looking for water leaks, finds them, and fixes them.”
Blackburn said one of his favorite parts of this new technology is that their office at City Hall can run a report every day to see if there are any unusual spikes in water usage.
“If someone’s using water and we don’t think they should be, or it’s not normal for them to be using large volumes of water, we’ll call them and say, ‘Hey, you may want to look around; you might have a leak.’ And about 50% of the time, it’s somebody who left the hose running, and we found out about it before they did.”
At the end of the day, the mayor said it’s about being a good steward of resources.
“It should be criminal if you get up to 40% of your water going into the ground,” Blackburn said. “If I were a ratepayer—and I am one of the consumers, I’m a ratepayer—and you come to me and you say, ‘I need a rate increase,’ and you’ve got some outstanding number of unaccounted-for water loss, I’m gonna say to you, ‘Well, once you get that unaccounted-for water loss under control, then come to me about a rate increase.’”
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
