La Cañada Flintridge to purchase recycled water from Glendale to irrigate median plants

Not content to let city trees die amid state mandates banning the use of potable water for street medians, La Cañada Flintridge is securing truckloads of recycled water from the city of Glendale to get the job done.

Because La Cañada does not have its own recycled water infrastructure, its city officials sought out an opportunity to purchase non-potable water to safeguard the health of trees and plants in its street medians.

They looked for a solution with Glendale Water & Power, which maintains a program that grants construction companies temporary access to hydrants for a per-unit fee. Users are given a meter that measures water output and charges them accordingly, said Michael De Ghetto, the utility’s assistant general manager.

“If someone’s building a building, and they need water during construction, (they) can put a meter on the hydrant,” De Ghetto said on Friday. “We take reads on the meter and then bill them for however much is used.”

La Cañada Flintridge will be the first city to open an account for use of the construction meters, typically used by crews on building projects. The plan works because the cities are close enough together to keep the trucking costs from being cost prohibitive, De Ghetto said.

Currently, La Cañada is using Glendale’s recycled water to irrigate medians three times a week along Foothill Boulevard, Angeles Crest Highway and a landscaped island at the corner of Oakwood Avenue and Lynhaven Lane.

The combined water use for one round of irrigation is about 7,000 gallons which, at $2.47 per 100 cubic feet, costs about $24 per watering, according to Edward Hitti, public works director for La Cañada. Funding for that comes from La Cañada’s general fund.

Plans are to continue the watering throughout the end of this month, at which time crews from the La Cañada Public Works Department will assess the health of the vegetation to determine whether twice weekly watering would work just as well.

Hitti called the idea a semi-permanent solution for the time being.

Irrigating public landscapes with nondrinkable water is permissible and encouraged under the executive order issued by Gov. Jerry Brown in April, according to a release issued Tuesday by the city of La Cañada.

Recycled water, although not fit for drinking, is treated to tertiary levels, a purification level fit for landscape irrigation. De Ghetto said given that Glendale has an adequate supply of non-potable water, and that metered hydrant tapping amounts to a relatively small demand, the move is no sacrifice.

He added that, because both cities import water from the Metropolitan Water District, any move that reduces the demand of one city’s potable water use is equally beneficial for both cities.

“La Cañada Flintridge being able to cut back on their water usage helps everybody in the region,” De Ghetto said.

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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine