THE Western red bud trees, ceanothus, island snapdragon and other native flora have been planted with care and precision in front of a new Santa Monica house. Good thing they're not thirsty plants, because not one drop of water has flowed from a special irrigation system installed last June.
Homeowner Steve Glenn is frustrated. He's still waiting for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to sign off in order to turn on the underground drip system, which will recycle water from his bathroom sinks, showers, laundry sink and clothes washer.
Using so-called gray water during what may be a record dry year seems like a no-brainer, but Glenn is finding otherwise. Residents who want to conserve a precious natural resource encounter road blocks, often in the form of red tape.
"I knew there weren't many residential gray-water systems," Glenn says of the drawn-out procedure to get his final certificate of occupancy. "I knew the process was not refined, but I didn't realize it would be this hard."
California authorized the use of gray water statewide for single-family homes in 1992. The state Department of Water Resources developed standards and provided a Graywater Guide for homeowners and others (www.owue.water.ca.gov/docs/graywater_guide_book.pdf). But particulars such as permit and inspection requirements were left to local jurisdictions. In Santa Monica and Los Angeles, for example, the building and safety departments oversee gray-water construction. Both cities also require approval from the L.A. County health department.
The agencies often have different requirements, which can ratchet up a homeowner's cost to install a gray-water system. "The policy makers desperately need to vertically integrate this process: bring in inspectors, building and safety people and others so everyone is on the same page, so the process is simplified for the homeowner," says Bill Wilson, a Mill Valley environmental planning and engineering consultant who has installed many systems including Glenn's. He says he has encountered similar bureaucratic delays in other California cities.
Wilson says some people will pay a premium to have an ecologically savvy system. "There are people who are motivated and don't want to pay the price, doing it anyway," he says. "There are not a lot of permits, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of systems."
