st. paul

Conservation is both good for the environment and the pocket book.

I'm not exactly sure when they phased out paying people to actually go to your house and "read" your water meter, but the decrease in water use may have something to do with the fact that it's now electronically recorded, and is supposedly more accurate.

When water use declines in Plymouth, MN, it appears that they jack up the sewer rates to ensure that even with overall lower water use, the city takes in sufficient revenues to pay employees their compensation + benefits.

Cleaned by capitalism.

Great news ! Water is Earth's most valuable resource.

WOW! Mpls reduced their annual use by 378 million gallons! Does anybody realize how COMPLETELY insignificant that is? The Mississippi flows by at 13000 Cubic feet per second. 378M annual is a whopping 1.6 CFS. Put another way, Mpls could increase its use by 378M gallons a year, every year for a thousand years, a whole bleeping millenium, and it would still be less than 10% of the flow. And most of the water "used" by a city flows right back into the river, either thru the treatment plant of the groundwater or the street sewer. Since we have systematically paved the city and draintiled the country to fill that river, it should be our civic duty to use as much as possible on our lawns and gardens, parks, and golf courses to help replenish the water table. Bill G.

The brief mention of the fact that most suburbs use drastically more water in summer deserves more attention. Even if it has decreased overall, increasing water use 4 fold in summer to keep a green lawn is ridiculous.

our house was built with a well/septic. 5yrs later the city came in with water/sewer. the prior owner paid to hook up. but we still have well water for outside faucet. our lawn water is recycled so its "free".

Garagewine write, "cleaned by capitalism." While that is somewhat cryptic, and could be taken a number of ways, it could be taken that he/she believes capitalism drives the decrease in water use. Make water more expensive and use goes down. It's basic capitalist economics.

I was completely serious- we should be pumping water out of the Mississippi, filtering it and using it to water parks and golf courses, any lawns that happen to be along those trunk lines, and irrigating crops to intentionally replenish the aquafiers so others not fortunate to be on those trunk lines can water their lawns and take long showers. It is absolutey ridiculous to suggest Minnesota is short of water when we are turning the landscape into a huge storm sewer to flush it downriver as fast as possible. Bill G.