During the Long Drought Laughter Can Be All Wet

The fun may be going out of the drought real fast.

Too bad, because it started on such an amusing note: A list of the 100 biggest water-using homeowners in San Diego (La Jolla, mostly). A one-day newspaper story and five days of radio gags.

It turns out that the rich are different from you and me: They use more water. The well-heeled are also the well-watered.

Talk about soaking the rich! Turns out they’ve been soaking themselves.

Less funny was the listing of Kelco Corp., the seaweed company, as the biggest corporate water user, 1.1 billion gallons a year.

Nothing mirth-inspiring about the idea of Kelco maybe laying off a bunch of its 600 employees.

Add to that the gloomy prospect of brown lawns, yellow toilet bowls and squads of water finks tattling on their neighbors. Bummer.

Maybe it’s the sense of what-can-we-do-now? that has people down. If so, Al Tierney has an idea.

Tierney runs Tierney’s, a paper products wholesaler in El Cajon. For the drought, he has shifted into a sidelight: rain barrels.

Forget cloud-seeding, billion-dollar desalination plants, and political blunderbusses like reviving the Peripheral Canal debate.

For $36, Tierney will sell you a 55-gallon plastic rain barrel. Good for snatching rain or, with a little modification, recycling your bath water.

Tierney knows that a rain barrel is not a panacea. But he figures it will help a little bit and keep people from going crazy with hopelessness.

“Mostly it’s a pacifier,” Tierney said. “A rain barrel is something to make people feel better.”

Personally, Tierney doesn’t need a rain barrel. He sunk a well on his property in Santee a while back.

Don’t you just hate people who plan ahead for a dry day?

Council’s Out of the Picture

Money, politics and cable television.

Cox Cable San Diego had a burst of public beneficence about a year and a half ago. It offered to pick up the $51,000-a-year cost to keep televising San Diego City Council meetings on a tape-delay basis.

This was greeted with great cheer at cash-poor City Hall.

The average council member thinks his/her council enemies look like baboons on television, but that he/she looks like civic virtue personified.

Oh, did I tell you that at the same time Cox decided to be such a good corporate citizen, it was also angling for a 20-year extension on its franchise agreement with the city?

The agreement allows Cox to pay some of the lowest fees in the country.

After increasing scrutiny, particularly from Councilman Bruce Henderson, Cox withdrew its extension request some months ago.

This week the council went even further: it voted to encourage competition from other cable companies.

Guess what happened on the very same day as the 8-0 vote?

Council members received a memo from Cox announcing that there would be no more free televising of council meetings after June 30.

The explanation: other local city councils have asked for the same freebie, and, since Cox can’t afford freebies for everyone, it decided to treat all alike: Pay your own way.

A Cox spokeswoman says the no-freebie decision is not retaliation for the council’s call for competition.

Others aren’t so sure.

3 Women in the News

Media moves.

* The March edition of Ladies Home Journal has a story on the Broderick case: “Hell Hath No Fury.” Close readers see a pro-Betty tone.

* Donna Jackson, the Army reservist from San Diego who challenged the Pentagon’s ban on homosexuals, is on the cover of “On Our Backs,” a magazine for “adventurous lesbians.”

* Fighting recall, San Diego Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt is going door to door with flyers entitled “3 1/2 Facts You Should Know Before Voting on April 9.”

The half-fact is her allegation that the San Diego Union has a vendetta against her.