Water conservation, in its various ways, could well become a perpetual RWC Board goal

By Sam Richards

Staff writer

Thursday, July 31 (10:00 a.m.): In June, as it does each year, the Rossmoor Walnut Creek (RWC) Board chose a short series of “SMART” goals – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely – for the following year. This year, four such goals were selected; one of them is “evaluating water conservation and recycled water opportunities.”

Such goals are designed to be achievable during the Board’s year, beginning in May each year, as not to burden future Boards with priorities that aren’t their own. But the ongoing nature of water conservation – and, as some might say, the increasing need for it – have made where Rossmoor will find water, and ways to conserve it, a priority of several consecutive Boards.

After a wet winter of 2024, there wasn’t much talk the past year or so about a “satellite water recycling facility” in or near Rossmoor that would create irrigation water from wastewater to meet Rossmoor’s needs. Those include keeping the two golf courses both aesthetically pleasing and a natural fire break and safety refuge should flames advance during a wildfire.

But possible alliances to build such a facility were a topic of high-profile conversation at a 2022 town hall meeting in Lafayette and could get renewed attention this year, said RWC Board President Leanne Hamaji.

“I’m pretty sure it will be talked about” in the next several months, Hamaji said last week.

Funding such a project would be a big ask, and Hamaji isn’t counting on a Rossmoor-only water recycling facility being part of RWC’s capital budget anytime soon – if ever. In 2022, the price tag for such a facility was $212 million.

Hamaji and fellow RWC Board member Dwight Walker said they believe a more likely path will be to seek a partnership of some sort to address water needs.

“A regional solution seems more doable, but that’s still a big task,” Walker said last week. “Central Contra Costa (County) needs a long-term solution for water, and it will take a regional solution.”

Hamaji and Walker said they expect Rossmoor to continue to speak with area legislators, community leaders and water providers like the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District about obtaining more recycled water.

“We need to find out whether there’s a possibility that could happen in the future,” Hamaji said.

But Rossmoor offers plenty of other opportunities for saving water, Hamaji said. What will happen, she and others said, will be the continued removal of “non-functional” turf, grass growing in areas where it isn’t particularly useful.

For example, where healthy grass is needed on the golf course fairways, it isn’t needed in more remote areas. The removal of such grass, and the need to water it, started a couple of years ago, and should continue to reduce Rossmoor’s dependence on water, be it from Tice Creek or from East Bay MUD.

Mark Heptig, Rossmoor’s director of golf, said 10 of the 18 tee boxes on Dollar course have had the adjacent turf reduced. Funding hasn’t been lined up yet to do that same work on the remaining eight holes, but he’s optimistic.

“We’re hoping that, since the (RWC) Board has made this one of its goals, that they’ll support the funding for it” in 2026, Heptig said.

The turf-reduction work on the 10 completed holes, plus some ancillary turf, has already paid significant dividends, Heptig said.

“We’ve turned 13 acres back to nature. … It’s a ‘per-head’ savings; when turf comes out, sprinkler heads come out,” he said. “When you remove a sprinkler head, that’s thousands of gallons a day that we don’t pump out to the golf course.”

Rossmoor’s street medians also demand less water than a year or two ago. An ongoing project to remove turf in the street medians, mostly along Rossmoor Parkway, and replace it with drought-tolerant plants was completed in December, said John Tawaststjerna, Rossmoor’s landscape manager. That conversion, he said, has so far done what was envisioned, and more.

“We estimated we would save about 950,000 gallons of water per year. It looks like we are on pace this year to save a little more than 1 million gallons,” Tawaststjerna said in an email.

Some further turf reduction, Hamaji said, can likely be achieved within the Mutuals.

Walker said water conservation may well be a RWC Board goal every year for the foreseeable future.

“Eventually, we’ll reach a point where we’ve done just about everything that can be done,” he said.