Prescott Valley open house outlines first formal water conservation plan; consultants present projections and proposed measures

Prescott Valley hosted a public open house to gather community input on a first formal water conservation plan, where consultants from Mados Water presented demand forecasts, current programs and a menu of proposed measures intended to reduce stress on the town's aquifer.

Tracy Lond, the town's water resources advisor, opened the meeting and said Prescott Valley has operated without a formal conservation plan since incorporation and needs written policies and incentives to "protect our aquifer" and ensure water for future generations. "We don't have anything on paper," Lond said, urging residents to weigh in as the consultants finalize measure analysis.

The consulting team, led by Lisa Mad. (engineer, Mados Water) and project manager Nikki Power, described a three-part approach: establish a calibrated demand forecast, quantify savings and costs for a wide set of conservation measures, and bundle those measures into program scenarios for the town to consider. Mad. said the consultants run a baseline 'do-nothing' forecast and then layer in plumbing-code-driven passive savings plus optional incentives and policies to build program A/B/C scenarios. "Conservation program is an expense, but it's an investment," Mad. told the audience, describing the team's cost-per-acre-foot and dollars-per-million-gallon analyses.

The consultants showed historical production and consumption trends and said they used Prescott Valley billing and production data to calibrate the model. They reported the town's current service-area figures and projections: the presentation noted a current service-population figure near 57,000 and a model projection that approaches about 80,000 people by 2055 under the town's growth scenario. The baseline analysis also found the system's non-revenue water (system water loss) to be about 8.8%, which the consultants described as reasonably low compared with many utilities and noted a technical minimum near 6% for well-maintained systems.

Mados Water presented five measures already included on the 'green list' for modeling: (1) continued system water-loss reduction; (2) targeted AMI (advanced metering) outreach and customer alerts; (3) conservation pricing through tiered rates; (4) a hot-water-on-demand requirement for new development; and (5) ongoing public education, including a citizens' water academy. The team also identified additional candidate measures for modeling and public feedback, including indoor fixture rebates, residential water surveys, turf removal and landscape retrofits, partnerships with energy utilities for combined incentives, and custom commercial retrofits.

The consultants emphasized that their model disaggregates water use by end use and customer class to estimate where savings are most likely. For single-family residential customers the consultants cited an approximately 71% indoor / 29% outdoor split, and for multifamily about 81% indoor / 19% outdoor, which informed the suggested mix of indoor and outdoor measures.

Attendees were invited to participate in an interactive activity and to complete a public survey that the consultants said closes April 15; the team said it will use survey results to select which 'yellow' or marginal measures to include in the next round of modeling. The consultants said phase two will return modeled program scenarios and cost-benefit results to the town and that a final conservation program will be presented to the Prescott Valley council for potential adoption.

No formal votes or council actions were taken at the open house; the session was a public engagement workshop to inform the consulting team's modeling and the town's subsequent policy decisions.