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Water is something that most of us take for granted in our day-to-day lives…we open a tap, and it’s available, clean and safe. But for many cities, water is fast becoming a precious and dwindling resource, and Okanagan residents typically use more than twice the Canadian average.
Welcome to Kelowna Talks, a podcast presented by the City of Kelowna that explores the "why" behind the decisions that shape your city. Tune in for weekly episodes with host, Bob Evans, Partnerships Office Director with the City of Kelowna, as he welcomes guest subject matter experts to explain the processes and decisions that influence the lives of the citizens.
Kelowna Talks - EP16
Kevin 00:01
When we're thinking of how we use water for irrigation, we need to think about what is the value to our community? Are farms important to us? Or is my backyard lawn more important?
Zoe 00:12
Welcome to Kelowna Talks, where we explore the why behind the decisions that shape your city. Together, we open the curtain and dig deep into current issues, plans and policies that come out of City Hall. Thanks for joining us as we talk about Kelowna, and the topics that matter to you.
Bob 00:37
Hi, everyone, I'm Bob Evans, partnership director at the City of Kelowna and host of our Kelowna Talks podcast, I acknowledge that our community is located on the traditional ancestral unceded territory of the Syilx, Okanagan people. Well, today we're talking about water. It's a tricky subject in the Okanagan. Because we are blessed with this large beautiful lake in the summer, we often have drought conditions. Water is something that most of us take for granted in our day to day lives. I certainly know I do open a tap and it's available clean and safe. But for many cities, water's fast becoming a precious and dwindling resource. One recent example is Cape Town in South Africa that came within days and become the first major city in the world to actually run out of water. And slightly closer to home, California, Nevada has suffered extreme droughts in recent years. So what is our water situation? And how can we get people to conserve more water so that we're not in that type of perilous situation? So today, we're talking with Kevin Van Vliet our utility services manager about the water situation in Kelowna, and to a certain extent, the valley, he oversees our drinking water, our wastewater, the landfill and water quality. Welcome, Kevin. So Kevin, we like to start these sessions, getting to know a little bit about yourself, not just the job. So tell us a little bit about yourself when you're not overseeing our cities utility systems. Well, when I'm when I'm not at work, I'm home with my family. I've got a couple of late teenage boys now we're getting near the finishing high school and empty nesting.
02:10
Well, when I'm when I'm not at work, I'm home with my family. I've got a couple of late teenage boys now we're getting near the finishing high school and empty nesting. I enjoy getting out on the water on my kayaks. I don't do it anywhere near enough. Most of the time. I seem to be working on the honey-do list in the yard. But those are some of the things I enjoy. Certainly getting out on the water.
Bob 02:23
Oh good. Well, that kind of fits with the job a little bit. I guess you can maybe do some inspections when you're floating around the lake or
Kevin 02:28
yeah, I gotta find a way to do that on worktime I suppose.
Bob 02:32
We'll send a memo to Doug together after this one. So I love stats, so we'll start off with a good one. Figures from the Okanagan basin waterboard show that on average Okanagan residents use 675 litres of water per person per day, year round, in and around their homes. To me, that's absolutely staggering. This is more than twice the Canadian average of 330 liters and much higher than most other countries that the Okanagan has the lowest per personal water availability in Canada. Those numbers are kind of disturbing. How are we using so much water? Like how do we get there? And what causes that? And what can you help me understand about that, Kevin?
Kevin 03:10
Well, yeah, we could probably spend a day just peeling the onion back on stats and stuff. If you'd like stats, maybe we'll do that another time. But the fact that we have a very dry climate, you mentioned it's one of the driest climates in Canada, we had less than 400 millimetres of rain a year. And the fact that people like green lawns, and we historically are a culture of having a lot of greenness around us is is what's driving that water use, right? So lawns are really thirsty plants, we tend to see a lot of cedar trees and cedar hedging, which provides a really nice green wall. And you see those going into new developments all the time. And they are incredibly thirsty as well right there. And they're not native to this kind of climate. And as a result, we have to put a lot more water on them to keep them alive than we would on the coast, for example, right, they’re more of a native plant. So we could use a lot less water if we were more trying to live our lives or certainly our yards and our private spaces a little bit more attuned to what the local climate is. Xeriscape is a lot of people would call it right.
Bob 04:19
Yeah, no, fair enough. We you know, we've done multiple surveys at the City of Kelowna, over the years, and you know, we have various people writing and so on and, you know, water conservation water restrictions is certainly one of the I guess, let's call it a hot button with with Kelowna residents, and I have a quote here. "We live in a huge lake, we have lots of water". What's What's wrong with that statement?
Kevin 04:42
Well, it is certainly misleading, right? And if you want to look at an example of where that didn't work out, so well look at Lake Powell or Lake Mead in the US where those absolutely massive reservoirs are down over 100 feet, just huge a volume of water. So the challenge was that our lake, and looking at it is there's only a small amount that goes into the lake every year, right. And so we have to be cognizant of how much we take out of the lake and make sure that we don't exceed what goes into it. Right? When we have to leave some of the water that goes into it, we have to leave for the fish and Okanagan River downstream. And we have to make sure that there's enough released as well. So that is our limit. It's not the fact that we have this massive lake, if we withdraw more than goes in every year than that lake level will continue to drop like they see in in Lake Mead, and in other places, then it becomes very, very difficult to ever get that back up. We rely on the lake for our recreation, right fish rely on the lake and laying eggs around the foreshore. So it is very important that we keep the lake at that full or near full, normal level
Bob 05:47
And a lot of people people don't understand that we don't control that, the city does not control the water level. That's the provincial authority.
Kevin 05:55
That's right. Yeah. But you know, even if we start mining the lake and it starts to drop there, there isn't enough. There won't be enough to go south of Okanagan down Okanagan River. So we have to use less than what goes into the lake every year. And being a dry climate that isn't a huge amount.
Bob 06:14
Well, it's probably a concept a lot of people don't think about is that balancing act and the fact that it's a limited resource, and they look at the lake and they see all the all the beautiful water and the wonderful depth of our lake and the clarity of it. And it just has that perception of an unlimited resource. And I guess the question is, how do we work on changing that perception?I wasn't thinking this whole podcast is going to be about necessarily just water conservation, but it just it's such an important topic for us when it's, you know, 38 degrees out today.
Kevin 06:42
Yeah. And, you know, when we think about the lake, I think we, it really helps us just to think about water holistically, you know, as you say, right, like, we're relatively unique in Kelowna, where we are living in the whole life, the water cycle, right, so the rain falls, what we do to make sure that it stays clean in the creeks. And before it gets to the lake, what we do to make sure that it's protected, you know, on our streets, because a lot of the water running off the streets is running into the lake really matters. Because what goes into the lake, ultimately we play in, we play on and we drink, right? So it's really important for us to think holistically as, as that water is a precious resource, not just for irrigation, but also how we treat it, what we put down the pipes, what we put down our drains, what we put in our catch basins, right? We're living in that cycle. So whatever we put down there, we're gonna have a little molecule or two eventually in our glass at some point in time, so we got to be conscious of that.
Bob 07:36
Well, we talked about irrigation. So that's also on my list that many folks are quick to point out that agriculture in the cities still the agricultural fields, orchards, vineyards, around us still water regularly, and in the city itself, and parks and our open spaces, and therefore residential watering restrictions are hypocritical. But actually, residential watering is far and away the greatest burden on our water system. Is that correct?
Kevin 08:03
Well, again, if you get into stats, it's a little bit difficult, right? But we have to remember that farms and irrigating farms, they're producing food, right, they're producing jobs. So that is an important part of our economy. That's also an important part of our life. Right. So when we're thinking of how we use water for irrigation, we need to think about what is the value to our community of what those irrigation plantings and stuff are right? Are farms important to us? Or is my backyard lawn more important?
Bob 08:34
So depends on the person you talk to you on any given day. So yeah, that's right. I mean, that's not, you know, obviously a well balanced approach or statement. But it's, it's reality, sometimes on the telephone calls we get inside City Hall.
Kevin 08:47
That's right. But most people when we talk to them really value the nature of agriculture in our communities, the green space, the vineyards on the hills. That's part of why they moved here, right? That's important. So we've created our city. Right? And so those are important. And that's also regulated, right? So farms aren't allowed to use whatever they want. They have limits amount for each farm, they have a limited amount of water that they're allocated, if they exceed that depends on the water provider. But certainly if they're a Kelowna utility provider, and many others, they start to pay big premiums if they exceed their allotment of water. So they're regulated as well. It's not just single family homes or residential homes that are regulated on how much water they can use.
Bob 09:31
Well, then, I guess, hopefully, the industry is evolving and maturing, in terms of the equipment they use, and monitoring and measuring waterfall and rainfall and then adjusting their irrigation systems and so on. Again, it's going to take time, but I would hope there's an evolution in that both from the cultural sector as well as the residential areas.
Kevin 09:31
Absolutely. Yes, no, and we're seeing that right. You know, we see a lot more drip irrigation systems, things that are much more efficient. And a lot fewer they really heavy overhead sprinklers that you know, in that are running in the day when when water evaporates a lot faster. So farms are becoming a lot more efficient than they were 20 or 30 years ago as well.
Bob 10:12
Okay, that's good. So we've had all this cold wet weather for the spring here in Kelowna. And I'm just wondering, does that help overall water outlook? Or can you help me understand that?
Kevin 10:24
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Certainly, it certainly helps for this year, right. As far as not being in a water shortage problem. Even if we end up with a hot dry for the rest of the summer, most of the water, you know, we have a lot of water stored in the upper watershed, we know that the lake went a little bit above full pool was all helped make us a normal water supply year, so we don't have a shortage. One of the things here in the Okanagan is it's usually a longer term, multi year drought, it's going to start to see us having real problems, right. So it's always what happens in the winter, how much snow we get, how much snowpack, how much water goes into the lake, and where's it all stored, that kind of defines how much water we have for the next summer. So even last year, with the heat dome, we had a fair amount of water, you know, in storage, and you can get through the heat dome. And we can usually certainly in Kelowna for our customers, we can get through a hot, dry year, it's multiple hot dry years in a row, which is what they're seeing in California, for example, after 18 or 20 years of drought, that really starts to add up. Climate change is happening that we need to start changing our water use to prepare ourselves for that inevitable climate change. We're starting to see it, like we did with the heat dome last year. We're certainly seeing that in Europe right now. We're seeing it in the western Southwest US climate change models predict for us hotter, drier summers, which is going to mean more water use and more water demand for irrigation, right, it's gonna be a lot more evaporation, people are going to want to water a lot more of the crops are going to need a lot more. So we need to start preparing for that start, you know, on the optional planting, let's start planting things that don't require quite as much water. And there's two real drivers that people need to remember. The first is the water supply, making sure there's enough. And then the second one is the delivery mechanism, right? So our pipes are designed to deliver a certain amount of water at the peak times. If that amount of water or that demand goes up. Because of you know, hotter, drier summers, we're going to have to invest an awful lot of money into bigger pumps, bigger pipes. People want to have their water rates be reasonable and low. Right? And so that's also a motivator to use water more conservatively.
Bob 12:34
Money is always a motivator for people. Yeah. You know, we were talking about Las Vegas and apparently under a new state law in Las Vegas. They're banning all grass lawns and mandating the removal. Do you think we'll ever get there here or? Well? Yeah, what does that what does that look like if we're, I always like to talk about standing on a mountain top 20 years from now looking around Kelowna, we still gonna see lawns?
Kevin 12:56
I certainly hope we never get to the point where we have to mandate removal of lawns and stuff. That's an act of desperation, or certainly is a symptom of having a real shortage and a real problem, right. People love grass. They love our green parks. So you know, from a tourism perspective, right, people love coming to city parks being able to sit on the lawn underneath the trees and the grass, etc. So there's a lot of value certainly in having some communal areas which is green, right. There's also value in the importance in the sports fields actually having green softish turf, because it prevents injuries, right? You get a lot more if we let our sports fields go brown, we get a lot more broken arms, broken wrists, especially for people can't play rugby and football on them, for example. But we take a different approach. We try to encourage people in part especially on the residential water side through our pricing to be more proactive in in using less water thirsty landscaping, right the lawns, probably one of the one of the most in our tiered pricing. If you want to have a lawn you can but you're gonna pay more for that water. Right? If you want to, if you want to have a lawn have a small lawn
Bob 14:07
just because the consumption you mean Yeah, it doesn't. We don't charge by item we charge by consumption. Just to be clear,
Kevin 14:13
We charge by consumption exactly right. So if you want to have a, if you want to irrigate a vast, large area of green lawn, it's going to cost a fair amount of money because it's going to use a lot of water. So our pricing prioritizes indoor water use, right some of the cheapest water we have is for indoor water use for your basic health and a little bit of outdoor irrigation. And then the more you irrigate outside, the more your you will pay per cubic meter of water. Now that said, in Kelowna, we still have some of the cheapest water in Canada. So and one of the main reasons for that and gets back to my earlier point about protecting our watershed protecting the lake is we're not filtered, right. So we have, and as long as we can keep Okanagan Lake as clean as it is, we will be able to take drinking water from it, treat it with UV, ultraviolet, and chlorine and distributed that it's way cheaper than filtering it. Right? So, so that is a motivator as well to make sure that we watch what we do for everything is going down the drain and going down the catch basin and everything else to protect the lake water quality.
Bob 15:23
Okay, that's good for all of us. As you're talking, I'm thinking, gotta ask this question whether you can answer it or not, is what's the worst offender in Kelowna? Like, how bad is it like our Do we have one or two? Or three or five or 50? Outliers? Or are we all as a group need to raise our level of consciousness when it comes to water conservation? Or what's your take on that,
Kevin 15:48
I would say as a group, we really need to raise our general water consciousness, that also helps with the peer pressure, right? Like if everybody's watering a little less, or there's more and more people are putting in, you know, more xeriscape plants more lavender, for example, and removing cedar hedging and replacing it with some lavender or some pine or something like that. It becomes more of the norm, and more people are willing to do it. So that's a good collective thing. And having a little bit of brown in your lawn shouldn't be seen as bad. You know, there are some neighbourhoods where, where you're the pariah if you got some brown lawn or the odd dandelions. And it's like, no, we have to move away from that. You can go to some places on the coast, which used to be rainforests, but they're like on the island in particular, right? But the water is so precious that the lawns go brown. And that's the norm and you're kind of seen as a pariah. If you've got a green lawn. We can't really get there here in the Okanagan, because it's so dry. If you don't water your lawn at all, it'll die and blow away. But we do need a bit of a cultural shift, right that the green rain forest kind of green and rainforests kind of plantings aren't effective here, right? They don't really belong here. If we want to, you know, sustain ourselves for the long term.
Bob 16:59
Do we police that, you know, so if there's a couple of prolific offenders when it comes to water use, or basically it's just, you know, pay as you go. So if somebody wants to spend $50,000 on their residential watering every year, we let them do that? Or how does work?
Kevin 17:17
We have tools in our bylaws to stop someone from being an excess or a waster. So we certainly can can deal with a property that runs their garden hose down the gutter just because they're too lazy to turn it off. For example, pricing, you know, our our top tier pricing at over $2 a cubic meter is about four times the rate at the beginning is a huge deterrent, and most people that affects their behaviors enough.
Bob 17:45
Okay, so as you get more and more use, as your meter goes up, it just the rate changes?
Kevin 17:49
The rate changes. So our peak rate for residential homes is $2, a cubic meter. And that adds up, right, so even wealthy people don't like spending, they don't like getting a three or $4,000 water bill after two months. So that is really effective. So we haven't had had to use the stick. For properties around that sort of thing.
Bob 18:10
It's just good for us to know, people like to know there's, you know, the, the rule followers are, like, you know, there's there's penalties if somebody is not a rule follower, or so that's, that's good to hear. So, we've talked a lot about climate change on past podcasts. And I don't think citizens consider that these floods, fires and extreme weather events affect the city significantly. from a budget perspective, we've talked a little bit about that. You get a bird's eye view on our whole utility system. What are your thoughts around climate change going forward? And the challenge, as we as we look to the future of Kelowna.
Kevin 18:47
When it comes to water and water supply, we've got two main challenges. The water models predicted that we actually get wetter over time, right, so we will have more waterfall between January 1 and December 31, in the city of Kelowna, and in our watersheds, unfortunately, more of it will fall as rain. So our first challenge is historically our systems have all relied on that storage in the upper watersheds being snow, right and slowly releasing to the lake. So we can expect more flash flooding events, on a water supply challenges in storing that water, right, especially in the upper watersheds, because a lot of our water systems rely on that water from the upper watersheds, flash floods, like we saw on June 14, where we weren't expecting, you know, the massive amount of rain that happened in the in the upper watershed and the impact on Mission Creek. So in the spring, in the winter, we've got that challenge. And then in the summer, we're going to have hotter, drier summers, more heat domes, more hot weather, you know, a longer period of time where we get really hot, that increases the supply and the demand. So that's the second challenge right, is can we not have the demand go up so high by reducing the types of plants we have having more resilient plants that can handle that kind of heat, and don't need huge amounts of water, because we're going to struggle to supply a lot more water in that hot hot period, if we struggled to store it in the in the winter, so we have some big investment decisions and discussions gonna happen, you know, over time here, and that's, you know, we need to be able to adapt to that, and our systems have not been built for it, they've been built for the last 100 years status quo, lots of snow in the mountains, comes down in an ACC calm freshet in the spring. And, and we're starting to see that happen less and less, and it's being a little bit more chaotic.
Bob 20:40
Right, you know, I, you know, I hope it's part of more of a normalized conversation around our dinner tables. And I think the heat dome last year, certainly increased the conversation around climate change in our house increased our conversation about about water and drought. And, you know, even in our personal yard, we lost certain plant materials that just could not handle that sustained heat. And that becomes pretty obvious. So we're not gonna go and take out a dead plant that couldn't handle it and put the same one in, you know, have to look at a personal garden and see how do we adapt? And how do we modify? And how do we address these events that will, unfortunately, probably be a little bit more regular than they have been.
Kevin 21:22
And one of the things I think I'm considering and we need to consider collectively is, as you say, you doing it a little bit at a time, right? It's one, it's not an easy thing to say, Okay, I'm gonna rip up my whole front yard and put in a xeriscape. Right. We can't afford to do that exactly right. It's a huge expense. But as certain plants die, or think about the build back better, right? What am I going to put in its place? Can I put in plantings or maybe modified little, small sections of my yard every year and make them a little bit more xeriscape more resilient to those hot, dry summers that we're gonna have?
Bob 21:58
Yeah, it's something we have to think about I, but who doesn't love the smell of the early morning irrigation system on a lawn? That's the, that's the change we have to make. And I'm only laughing because I'm thinking of myself. It's, it's the irony of, of what we have to do. And, and where we need to go as a community as a city. We're coming to the end of our time, we wanted to purposely focus on water because it's such a relevant topic. And the fact that it's July, and it's hot out, and we're using lots of irrigation. But you're also responsible for wastewater, and landfill and so on. Is there anything else that you wanted to share with the listeners on either wastewater or landfill and hot topics that needed to move for us to know a little bit more about?
Kevin 22:48
Well, just keeping with the theme of water, you know, I think, in many ways, it's kind of magic to people. Right? Open the tap, there it is. It's reliable, wastewater as well, right. And you open the tap, you run it, it goes down the drain, and you're confident that it's going to be dealt with, safely and environmentally, that takes a lot of resources, it takes a lot of staff, it takes a lot of energy, electricity to move the water around all of our water, all of our drinking water from the Kelowna utilities pumped, right? So some of the water reaching some homes has gone through three or four pump stations before it gets there. So keep that in mind that it is a precious resource takes a ton of resources to get to your home to be there when you need it. And treat it as a precious resource. Because it really is.
Bob 23:35
Well that's I think, a good place for us to rest and, and conclude this podcast. It's a precious resource. And we appreciate that we have people like you at the city taking care of that and stewarding our vision and putting the right tools in place and the right policies in place to make sure that we all have fresh, clean water coming out of our taps and for our corporate and personal uses. So thank you, Kevin, thank you to you and your team. And it's been a pleasure having you today and glad you showed up and had the chat about water.
Kevin 24:07
Thank you, Bob.
Zoe 24:11
Thank you for listening to this episode of Kelowna Talks. For more conversations about topics that matter in your community. Subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, give us a five star rating and review and share Kelowna Talks with your friends and neighbours. For more information about this podcast and other big community conversations, visit kelowna.ca/communitystories