Lance Wins! Local Hero Named Austin's Top Water User.

International bicycling phenomenon Lance Armstrong was named the top water user in Austin, according to a list published by the Statesman. He paid $1,630 for 222,900 gallons of water. Astounding ingenuity and persistence enabled local attorney Carolyn Beckett to take the number two spot by using 174,400 gallons of water, even though her 1/3 acre lot doesn't have a swimming pool or a sprinkler system. Austinites overall use about 180 million gallons of water a day during the summer.

The City of Austin is spending a million dollars on an advertising campaign to convince people use less water and has made it illegal to use sprinkler systems all but 30 hours a week (of course, 99.9% of the people that break that law don't get a ticket for it). Americans didn't change their driving habits until gas hit $4 a gallon, despite threats of global warming and financing terrorism. Why does anyone think catchy jingles, unenforced laws and public humiliation are going to change watering habits?

The Austin Water Utility charges for water on a sliding scale: the first 2,000 gallons cost less than 1/10 of a penny per gallon; after 15,000 gallons every additional gallon costs about 3/4 of a penny. These prices aren't adequate to inhibit water usage - most people on the Statesman's list didn't know they were using so much water until the article's author called them. The city is proposing to increase those prices next year, but the increases do not target major users. If we want to conserve water, we should raise the price for big water users by adding another tier to the pricing scale. $4 per gallon for every gallon over 30,000 would do the trick. That would bring Lance's bill to around $772,000 per month, which would either get him to stop watering the giant lawn all day every day or solve the city's budget problems and pay for all kinds of fancy new water treatment plants.