Santa Fe had substantial success cutting per-capita water consumption. Now the New Mexico capital city is focusing on a long-term conservation strategy built on youth education and public involvement in decision-making.

“A lot of research now shows that it’s the money and time we put in with our younger kids that will save the most water in a lifetime,” says Christine Chavez, water conservation manager. “If you try to teach an adult something different, first of all you have to break a habit that they’ve established for 30 to 40 years.

“Then they have to take on a new behavior. And for the rest of their lifetime, they’re going to save X amount of water. But if you change a 7-year-old’s behavior, we have so many more years of savings to consider. So where do we get the bigger bang for the buck, long term? We’re really looking at our youth to help us get there.”

Hitting a plateau

Chavez received the 2023 Water Star Award from the Alliance for Water Efficiency for making Santa Fe’s conservation programs a model for the Southwest. She notes that the city is fortunate to have multiple sources — Colorado River water, two well fields and two reservoirs — and a reuse project in development.

“And then we also consider conservation to be a source of water,” says Chavez. “The more water we conserve, the more that water can be used to support other things, like new residents who move here, or new industries and commercial uses.”

Santa Fe has been working on conservation for a long time. From 1995 to 2020, consumption has declined even though the population has grown. Per capita consumption in that period dropped 45%, from 168 gpd to 93 gpd.

But Chavez, who joined Santa Fe in 2017, finds it harder to make gains these days. The city has used incentives like bill credits for water-saving appliances; technical tools like the EyeOnWater web portal and smartphone app, which give customers data on water use and alerts them to possible leaks; and promotion of irrigation best practices for landscapes and gardens.

“Before we could just see water use declining,” she says. “Now we’re really getting down to demand hardening. A lot of people are already doing those simple things. How do we push that needle even further? And our managers now are asking: How much money are we spending per gallon of water saved?”

Creating partnerships

In previous positions, Chavez felt like a lone warrior for conservation, but since she came to Santa Fe she has focused on developing partners to help spread the message.

“I feel like the most essential part of this work is to form partnerships,” she says. “I can’t go out to all the schools. But if I partner with a group that’s already providing environmental education in schools, then I’m helping them do their job, and they’re tailoring their message to get the key points of our program across.” 

She has built partnerships with educators, with Santa Fe Community College, and with the chamber of commerce. “It never works for me to go to a business and say, ‘We’d like to audit your water use and give some recommendations.’ But if a chamber of commerce approaches that business and touts the benefits of saving water and saving money, that really helps us.”

Chavez has worked with the community college on a program to train water use auditors. “This is a multilayered program,” she says. “We’re building a workforce through the community college. We’ve built our own certification program. We have trained professionals doing audits of businesses on our behalf. And that’s where the Chamber comes in, too. They’re helping us promote this program, and they schedule the audits.”

Public involvement

The most important partnership is with the public. “We have a five-year scorecard,” Chavez says, “And then we create an annual scorecard based off that with the help of a citizen-based Water Conservation Committee. They help us write that, and then we report our progress to the public on our website every six months. Then, with public input, we develop the new scorecard for the upcoming year.”

Chavez observes based on her work with the committee that the public is very concerned about water quality and water scarcity. “One big reason for our success is that we continue to involve the public in our efforts and in the way we communicate what we’ve done, what we’re going to do, and what they would like to see us do.”

Santa Fe still gets a significant number of applications for installing water-saving appliances, but Chavez is also looking for high-impact projects. “We’re piloting a program now to go into low-income apartment complexes and doing a complete retrofit of all their toilets, showerheads and aerators,” Chavez says.

Projects like that help the residents by reducing their utility bills while conserving a lot of water: “In one of those projects, we’re replacing 300 toilets as opposed to the single application to replace just one.”

Over the years, Santa Fe has developed a culture of water conservation. Chavez tries to foster that with continuous public involvement and education. “As far as education we’re trying to establish the value of water, so that kids and teenagers and even their parents and families understand it is a limited resource,” she says.

The partnerships also help: “We’ve got great public support. I can turn to any of my partners now and they’re marketing our programs on their websites and to their email lists. It’s just like layers and layers and layers of communication.”