This ‘Cop’ Could Get You in Hot Water

Vince Audet is a water man. He used to be an electric man. That was during the oil embargo, though. The action, the new consumer war zone these days, is the drought. And he is one of the foot soldiers.

Armed with the disposition of a missionary, he’s a cheery fellow with a gentle manner and a trunk full of low-flow shower heads and brochures bound for those in need of the water word. When he’s not doling out helpful water-saving hints and freebie hardware, he trolls for the occasional water hog.

Audet, 59, is one of two full-time “advisers” assigned to police Anaheim’s water-rationing ordinance, a job so important that the city is recruiting six more. It is a relatively new position that cities from Palo Alto to San Clemente have adopted to battle the drought.

Mandatory water cutbacks have not been demanded here, but that may happen by summer in Orange County’s most sprawling city, where the amount of water used yearly could fill Anaheim Stadium to the top more than 100 times.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Audet said, “if we are citing people within 90 days for hosing down driveways.”

Home to Disneyland, a major league ballpark and the third-busiest convention center in the country, this 45-square-mile city has 18,000 hotel rooms and provides water to a population of 253,000 people.

With the stadium, the Anaheim Convention Center, two golf courses and 37 parks--plus municipal buildings and all those public road medians--the city is its own biggest customer. Next comes Disneyland, a model of conservation where 18 million gallons of water are recycled daily and state-of-the-art, low-flow toilets are being tested in bathrooms. Industry has been asked to draft conservation plans, too.

But Joe Resident still makes up 87% of Anaheim’s customers, and believe it or not, some of them have leaky sprinkler heads, dribbling faucets and water their lawns at high noon. Tsk, tsk. So Audet has been visiting some of them lately, checking out complaints filed on the water-waster hot line: 991-DRIP.

On a recent afternoon, his rounds included the ordinary and the outrageous, from your garden-variety offenders to a homeowner turned in by neighbors for running sprinklers hour after hour to water a cement yard.

Audet’s patrol car is a little Ford Escort, yellow with a city emblem on the passenger door--hardly intimidating. But sometimes, he says, people see it pull up to their curb and reel in the hose, uttering things like, “I don’t normally water at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.”

Bearing free, low-flow plumbing fixtures that he hands out at homes and public libraries, Audet heads for Anaheim Hills, a community with some of the priciest real estate in the county.

The neighborhoods here range from middle-class to wealthy, the water-wasting can include trickling hoses and extravagant waterfalls. At one home, the owner has called Audet out to try to knock down his $900 monthly bill.

“That guy must have fountains running 24 hours a day with a 3-horsepower (engine) running them,” Audet says with a smile. “He’s some kind of CEO (chief executive officer) though, so he wants me to make an appointment. Says he’ll take the day off to meet me.”

“Most of the calls we get from Anaheim Hills are new homeowners with questions about landscaping,” he adds. “They don’t want to put in a lawn they will have to let die in six months.”

Like all California cities, Anaheim was required by the state to draft a water-conservation plan. The city launched its program last fall and urged voluntary compliance. The City Council has approved an ordinance that will become effective in the next several weeks outlining escalating stages of conservation, from voluntary to mandatory. Everything from car-washing to landscape-watering will be affected. Audet and his colleagues will then have authority to issue citations.

Plan One now asks for a voluntary, 20% reduction in water use. But with drastic cutbacks demanded by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Anaheim City Council will consider launching Plan Two of Anaheim’s water-conservation plan at its meeting next Tuesday. It would restrict landscape-watering to early morning and evening and limit it to three days a week; ban hosing down paved surfaces and prohibit refilling pools, spas, ponds or artificial lakes.

Forced rationing would come with Plan Three.

Anaheim is not the only city employing advisers to educate and cajole water users into frugality.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest municipal utility in the country, began dispatching what it calls “drought busters” last May. They’ve issued 15,000 citations to date. San Clemente was the first Orange County city to hire a water cop, forced into conservation not by drought but by the inability to deliver enough water to its population because of undersize pipes.

Things could be worse for Anaheim, where nearly all water is supplied by the city’s own utility from ground-water wells. The utility buys only 25% of its product from the MWD, which has demanded cutbacks of 30% in urban areas such as Anaheim, starting next month.

In Northern California towns with mandatory water rationing, recent history has shown that people will conserve substantially and voluntarily if convinced that it is needed. They just need convincing.

Enter Audet.

Parked outside a home on Willowick Drive, Audet gathers his clipboard and scans the call slip: “Homeowner reports (his) back yard is turning white due to undetected leakage.” The source is not clear, but Audet suspects that it’s either the caller’s home or his next-door neighbor’s, who has a swimming pool.

An earnest look on his face, Audet noses around. There’s water spilling from a pipe near the curb, and the calcium deposits hint that it’s not a fresh break.

The rest of the front yard is water thrifty, landscaped with an attractive mix of flower beds and pebble-studded pavement.

But in the back yard, trenches snake around the lawn, and petroleum-tainted water flows through them, finally reaching the front street gutter via the encrusted pipe. Trees and thicket in the path of the ditches are dead. The source of the water is a mystery.

The woman at home speaks no English, so she telephones someone else. Audet takes the phone and asks some questions. The man on the other end of the line says he got a plumber to turn off his water main, but still the water seeped through his rambling property.

Audet concludes that the matter warrants investigation by the city’s Public Works Department, informs the understandably perplexed resident and moves on.

“Boy, I have no idea what’s going on here,” he confesses, climbing out from under a hedge of junipers. He brushes off his slacks and the woman of the house thanks him for coming.

A few blocks away, neighbors have reported a home where sprinklers have been running for 12 hours. This is peculiar considering that the front yard is mostly concrete except for three concentric planters and a slope around the perimeter. What isn’t concrete is mud. There are four sprinkler heads on the porch.

Nancy Miller answers the door. “My husband puts the sprinklers out and over-waters,” she explains. “It makes me furious. I’m glad you stopped by. He forgets it and goes on to something else. Then I discover it.”

She sits on her porch and smokes a cigarette as Audet politely listens. Then he tells her that she has “all the makings for a great landscaping situation for the worsening drought.”

“What you want to do is install a drip watering system” for the sparsely planted slope to avoid runoff, he suggests, handing her a pamphlet called “Thirty Ways to Conserve More Water.”

“What I want to do is rip out all the cement and put in a front lawn,” she replies. The homeowners association has been after them to landscape the place, she said. “Threatening us, really. My only excuse has been the drought.” She also gets a low-flow shower head.

“Thank you,” Miller says with a smile. “Now I’ve got some ammunition for my husband. . . . I wish I had that postage-stamp lawn across the street.”

Onward to Kaiser Permanente Hospital-Orange County, where an anonymous hot-line caller--most withhold their names--reports that water is sitting on the sidewalk. Blossom-filled flower beds near the street are narrow and their sprinklers probably spray the pavement. But the parking lot is gridlocked, so Audet jots a note to return another day.

En route to the next stop, Audet explains his love for energy-auditing. He worked for years as a private consultant to business, primarily Southern California Edison. More recently, he’s been employed by the city of Anaheim, handling claims of excessively high electric bills. Much as he does with water now, Audet would scour an office or home for electricity waste, things as seemingly innocuous as unnecessarily high light-bulb wattage. Then he offered solutions.

As the drought pressed into its fifth year, the Anaheim Public Utilities Department enlisted him to work the water front. Although he enjoyed electricity, the water-advising is clearly a job he relishes.

He’s also good at it. And as any good salesman knows, approach is everything.

At Anaheim Hills Realty, someone has reported all-night watering. Sprinklers on timers are big water-squanderers but an easy problem to fix. They usually over-water and even kick on when it is raining, but they can be turned off.

“Caltrans is one of the worst offenders,” Audet observes. “You see those sprinklers going off in the rain on the freeway embankments, and it’s just ridiculous.”

After explaining his sprinkler observations--not too sternly, more matter-of-factly--Irene Zelinski and other workers in the office are downright enthusiastic. They give Audet the building management’s telephone number. Then they offer, as Zelinski puts it, “to be your police out here.”

Audet assures them that more stringent phases of the city’s water ordinance will provide “code-enforcement people out all night long.”

Says Zelinski: “You can get my anesthesiologist next door. He washes his cars every day. He’s super clean. Must be his work.”

She and her colleagues said they find that more and more clients and friends are talking about water conservation. They think that people are beginning to care.

“A lot of people are redoing their toilets voluntarily so they use as little as 2 or 3 gallons a flush,” said JoAnn Biloon, a real estate broker. “It finally may be becoming hip to be conserving resources.”

Audet passes out low-flow shower heads before he moseys off. “Well, aren’t you wonderful,” Zelinski says brightly. “I have a teen-age granddaughter, so I can use this!”