THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 2, 1994 TAG: 9409010221
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
In your Aug. 7 edition you published a letter from a citizen who implied that (1) our water conservation program is not effectively reaching residential customers, (2) homeowners and their families waste a large percentage of the city's water and (3) our youth are especially wasteful.
Please let me explain why this is not true.
The city's water conservation program is working, as evidenced by our city's extremely low per-capita consumption for residential customers. Virginia Beach residential customers on average consume 60 gallons of water per day per person. This is one of the lowest residential per-capita consumption numbers in the nation. On the whole, our community is supportive of the city's water conservation measures. More important, they recognize the limited nature of our water supply.
The city's water conservation program has always had a strong emphasis on educating the city's youth in the need to conserve our water supply. Working in cooperation with both the public and private school systems, our youth are learning how to conserve water and why we should conserve water. Our goal is to develop an ethic in our community that water conservation is the right thing to do. It seems that in America, wasteful consumption of natural resources is almost commonplace. We are trying to remold our community's ethic in consumption of our drinking-water resource. Our youth and our teenagers are much more attuned to the need for water conservation than many people realize.
While it is true that we may have some teenagers who have not developed a water-conservation ethic, that is also true of the general population. There are some people who will always waste resources with little regard for the good of their community. But in Virginia Beach, that percentage of people is very small compared to other communities in our nation.
Every year the city of Virginia Beach Department of Public Utilities brings in a professional theater troupe known as Small Change Original Theater. Accomplished actors present nearly 100 plays each year to thousands of schoolchildren in Virginia Beach. The theme of each play is water conservation. Follow-up testing of the audience has shown that the conservation message is reaching them, and they are retaining and taking home this message to their families.
Another excellent example of youth involvement in our water-conservation initiative is the Old Donation School's booklet on water conservation. This booklet was developed by school-age children, for school-age children. This effort won the 1993 President's Environmental Youth Award from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The letter writer's suggestion that a video on water conservation be developed by teenagers, for teenagers has merit. We will follow up on this.
There is no basis upon which anyone can indict the homeowners, their families and their children in Virginia Beach for being wasteful of our community's water supply. True, in any community you may find households that are less attuned to water conservation than their neighbors. But the vast majority of Virginia Beach residents, as evidenced by the low per-capita consumption for residential accounts, are developing a strong water-conservation ethic.
Sarah Goodrich-Baird
Chairperson
Water Conservation Awareness
Committee by CNB