Water Conservation: Midland parks don't practice what they preach
Category: Local...
Posted Thursday, January 27, 2005 at 09:13 AM [GMT-6]

A recent article in the MRT detailed a new campaign to educate Texans on the importance of conserving water, our scarcest essential resource. The article quoted a few local officials who claimed that Midland is already proactive in that regard.

According to the article, Kay Snyder, director of utilities for the city of Midland, singled out the City Parks Department for kudos.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a rather significant disconnect between reality and city management's perception of reality.

My neighborhood park is Trinity Park, in the northwest part of town. I don't know how other parks are being handled, but at Trinity the sprinklers run every morning. I know this because Abbye and I have to dodge the water spray over the sidewalks when we make our rounds about 7:45 a.m.

There's no excuse for watering dormant bermuda grass every day. Any lawn expert will tell you that. At most, a good weekly watering is sufficient to keep the root system healthy during the winter.

Also, rain began to fall last night and the forecast is for continued rain today. Nevertheless, this morning the sprinklers were merrily depositing their daily offering onto the already wet turf.

Finally, adding insult to injury is the fact that someone recently decided that the sprinklers should run around sunrise, as I alluded to earlier and which is prime park-walking time for neighborhood residents. This is a recent, highly-annoying change; the only upside is that it's allowed us to observe the problems described above so that we can report them to the city.

Well, theoretically, we can report them. No one seems to be answering the phones at the City Parks Department, and the answering machine gives no clue that you've even reached that department. Instead, it mechanically informs you that [unintelligible] is not at her desk.

And, apparently, neither is anyone at the controls.