Tucson ups enforcement of requiring rainwater use for some landscaping

Three new city staff hires have vastly improved what was previously a weak to non-existent effort to enforce Tucson’s 15-year-old law requiring new businesses to harvest rainwater outdoors, officials say.

Since the staffers were hired starting about a year ago, compliance has been widespread with the city requirement for new businesses to rely heavily on water harvesting for outdoor landscaping, says City Manager Michael Ortega and the city’s Planning and Development Services Department, which enforces the law. At this time, all 137 new projects that have been reviewed by the city and built in that year are under compliance, said Ina Ronquillo, a Development Services spokeswoman.

That’s a sharp contrast with past findings by outside experts and city staff of widespread non-compliance in reports done in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

The ordinance requires new businesses to obtain at least half the water they need for their outdoor landscaping from rainwater. Its passage in 2008 helped put Tucson on the map, nationally, as a hotspot for the restoration of the ancient practice of capturing rainwater to nourish landscapes.

City officials estimate that about 30% of Tucson’s water supplies are used outdoors. So rainwater harvesting is seen as one of several possible ways to curb outdoor watering.

One way rainwater can be harvested is for a business to install cisterns or other tanks to capture and store runoff streaming down from rooftops. Or, a business can slope and contour its outdoor grounds in a way that directs rainfall straight to the trees, cacti and shrubs on its property.

But a 2018, city-financed study — which wasn’t released to the public for nearly three years — found that nine of a sample of 12 businesses that its authors inspected were using Tucson drinking water for more than half their landscape water supply. Most were using city water for well over half of their landscape watering, the study said.

Worse, no citations had been issued to violators, said the study, prepared by two independent experts including longtime Tucson rainwater harvesting pioneer Brad Lancaster.

A broader investigation by city staff echoed the experts’ findings, by concluding that the vast majority of 41 commercial projects examined that were built from 2016 to 2020 exceeded the 50% threshold. Nearly half were “grossly” out of compliance with the ordinance, said an early 2022 memo to the City Council by Tim Thomure, then an assistant city manager who is now deputy city manager.

But from Oct. 31, 2022, just after the first of the three new city staffers was hired, to Oct. 31, 2023, the Planning and Development Services Department has reviewed and approved 137 plans for new commercial development and inspected them once they were built.

The first new staffer, a landscape architect, was hired in September 2022, said Development Services spokeswoman Ronquillo. Two inspectors to help enforce the ordinance were hired in April 2023.

“While there will always be pushback to new regulations, the compliance and the submitted plans have improved considerably, with most projects complying with the ordinance from the onset rather than requiring multiple iterations to meet the requirements of the ordinance itself,” Ortega wrote in a Nov. 14 memo to the council.

“Often, the projects exceed the ordinance’s requirements by 20-30%. That translates to upwards of 75-80% of the required water usage of the plant materials being met by rainwater harvesting,” he wrote.

Asked by the Star to clarify Ortega’s estimates, Ronquillo said at least 60% of the commercial developers’ plans met the ordinance’s requirements at the time that city staff gave them their first review.

About 40% of the initial plans submitted “have missing components of the plan, aren’t meeting the minimum rainwater harvesting requirements of the plan, or don’t match the submitted grading plans and need revisions to them,” Ronquillo said in an email.

When the new developments were actually built, however, city inspectors found that eventually, all 137 businesses inspected met the ordinance requirements upon completion of construction, she said.

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"If they failed a commercial rainwater harvesting ordinance inspection, the developer had to bring that portion of the project into compliance prior to the inspection being passed," Ronquillo told the Star.

Overall, less than 40% of the projects inspected were not originally constructed to meet the requirements of the CRWHO and needed minor changes to meet compliance.

Roughly 10% of submitted projects exceed the rainwater harvesting ordinance’s 50% mandate by 20-30%, Ronquillo said.

City officials haven’t said what percentage of the new commercial developments met the 50% rainwater harvesting requirement once they were built and operating.

At the very beginning of this effort, “it was a struggle to get plans in compliance,” City Planning and Development Services Director Kristina Swallow — who was hired in June — told the council Tuesday. “Now, we find many are in compliance in their first submittal. If not, it’s not hard to get them into compliance.”

City Councilman Kevin Dahl said he’s “overjoyed” with the progress in enforcing the ordinance.

“A lot has changed in a year. I’m so happy to hear this update. Many thanks for getting it right,” Dahl said.

Back in March 2022, Dahl spearheaded the effort to hire the three staffers by pushing for a council vote to create the new positions at a cost of $284,000. He won on a 4-3 margin.

Those who opposed it said they agreed that staffing and enforcement needed beefing up, but that a decision to create new jobs should wait until the city considered and adopted a new city budget for the then-upcoming fiscal 2022-23 year, so all city needs could be considered simultaneously.

But one of the three to vote “no” at the time, Mayor Regina Romero, was effusive at Tuesday’s council meeting in her praise for the recent efforts to bring businesses into compliance.

“I just wanted to thank you for pursuing this ordinance we instituted a long time ago that for one reason or another was not put into compliance,” said Romero, one of two council members to vote for the 2008 ordinance who remains on the council. “Congratulations to Planning and Development Services for moving in leaps and bounds for doing this.”

“It’s very, very exciting. I’m really happy to hear it is moving in a great direction. We’ve already seen the product of what the commercial rainwater ordinance really was meant to be,” Romero said.

Looking ahead, city planners are also evaluating all past commercial developments approved since the 2008 ordinance passed to try to improve how future such developments are reviewed, Ortega and Swallow said. This allows the Planning and Development Services Department to “see what deficiencies in plan review exist, where strategic goals are not being met, and how to institute/implement better enforcement tools,” Ortega wrote.

Swallow said this work allows the department “to make sure we are applying the best practices.”

But in response to a question from Dahl about whether the earlier projects could now be improved, she said, “If we’re talking about projects constructed from the early years of the ordinance, it’s really nearly impossible to bring those projects into compliance.”