For the past year, South Florida has been sweltering through its worst drought in history, triggering restrictions on all sorts of water uses - lawn sprinkling, car washing, farm irrigation, you name it. But we wondered: Are our biggest water users really conserving? And is anybody enforc- ing the rules? For one story, we decided to look at the habits of our largest, most water-using homes and trust us, Palm Beach County has a lot.
We were aided by Florida's strong public records law, which requires govern- ment-owned water utilities to open their billing records to the public. For some cities and towns, we reluctantly gave up the search because we were running out of time to get the story in the newspaper. But local government here is divided among the county and 37 cities, towns and villages; some run their own utili- ties, and some are part of regional wa- ter systems.
So the search for data proved much longer and more complicated than we expected. The reporting and writing took nearly two months. First step First, we asked the utilities serving the county and 15 of the largest or wealthiest cities for a list of the single-family homes that used the most water in the year 2000. It would have been much simpler to ask for the top consumers for a single month; however, we asked for a year because we wanted the most consistently profligate water users, not people who might have had a bad leak for a week or two.
Some utilities, such as Palm Beach County and the city of Boca Raton, had no problem giving us what we needed; in some cases, the turnaround time was a day or less. Other utilities claimed that their 1970s-era computer systems couldn't pro- duce the data without writing a program, which would cost money. West Palm Beach, for instance, wanted to charge us $600 for programming time, We also got the runaround when we asked for West Palm Beach's complete water billing data- base on nine-track tape, which would have allowed us to run our own searches.
For some cities and towns, we reluc- tantly gave up the search because we were running out of time to get the story in the newspaper. We wanted West Palm Beach, though - its utility provides water to the town of Palm Beach, the island home of Donald Trump and other money-makers. Gotcha Finally our computer assisted reporting coordinator, Christine Stapleton, discov- ered that West Palm Beach periodically produces a report of its top 300 water ac- counts when it's considering rate changes.
Since that computer program already ex- ists, the city could simply run it for us at much less cost. One snag, though: Some water users had as many as seven separate water ac- counts for a single home. That meant we had to keep filing public records requests to get the additional account numbers for the top water users, then get the water use for each account. It also turned out that the wealthy often like to give fictitious addresses to different parts of their sprawling estates.
So we spent hours driving around the island and examining prop- erty records to match the addresses on the wa- ter bills to actual locations. We entered the top water customers for each utility into an Excel spreadsheet, list- ing the water supplier, the customer, the customer's address and the amount of water used in 2000. Many utilities use dif- ferent units of measurement - thousands of gallons, hundreds of cubic feet, etc.
- so we created a column to translate all numbers into gallons. We finally wound up with data from seven utility systems representing a major- ity of the county's households. The top 10 list was no surprise: All homes in the town of Palm Beach, including one owned by Revlon boss Ron Perelman. The top user, Arby's franchiser Nelson Peltz, used more than 2 million gallons a month, enough for 80,000 five-minute showers.
The story intrigued the mayor of West Palm Beach, who said he would explore the idea of charging a "guzzler fee" to encour- age the heaviest water users to conserve. As a followup, we examined another of South Florida's major water users: our hundreds of golf courses. Meanwhile, Peltz turned out to be a friend of Rush Limbaugh, who denounced the story on the air the next day as a classic example of liberal class-envy.
Limbaugh also announced that he was asking his wife to flush the toilet continually in hopes of mak- ing the list next year. So stay tuned. More stories As a followup, we examined another of South Florida's major water users: our hundreds of golf courses. But what was supposed to be a modest explainer story became more interesting when we discovered that several golf courses used a billion gallons more last year than they were legally allowed to - and nobody was penalizing them.
At first glance, this should have been an easy story to pursue: A state agency, the South Florida Water Management District, issues water permits to the golf courses, and it collects reports about their water use. But the reporting was far from simple. For one thing, district managers claimed they had no easily retrievable database list- ing the golf courses, their allowable water use and their actual pumping.
Creating such a database would involve "generating a record," which would allow the district to charge us hundreds of dollars for programming time. So reporter Chris Barker spent hours sit- ting in the district's offices, poring over the courses' permit files and typing the num- bers into Excel. His persistence paid off when one dis- trict employee took pity on him and gener- ated an electronic report containing some of the information he needed.
But then she stopped helping us, and the district's lawyers said all our requests had to go through them. Dirty data Also, the numbers themselves were a complete mess. Golf courses routinely added or dropped digits in their pumpage reports; some failed to submit reports for entire quar- ters, with no penalty from the district. So Barker had to spend more hours question- ing the employees who worked with the numbers about what they meant.
The district also employed a convoluted form of water-accounting that lumped together water pumped from wells, water pumped from ponds, water pumped from wells into ponds, and recycled sewage commingled with the other water sources. We used the most conser- vative numbers, which knocked the most dra- matic over-consumers off our Top 10 list. We still wound up with 13 Palm Beach County golf courses, including Donald Trump's, that used more than a total of 1 billion extra gallons in 2000 - a fact that surprised people at the water district.
A few days after the story ran, the district's board ordered an audit of its entire water permitting system. Some environmen- talists told us the story pointed to a dirty secret about Florida's water management system: The state really has no idea how much water people are using. Bob King can be reached by e-mail at bob_king@pbpost.com. Chris Barker can be reached by e-mail at chris_barker@pbpost.com.