Welcome to Brazos Matters.

I'm Jay Socol and with me is brand new campus student content contributor Kaleigh Mazy.

Hey, Kaleigh.

Hey, Jay.

I'm glad you're in here for our first show together, because this is your first time on Brazos Matters.

And you'll be with us for several more.

But tell us where you from and how you found your way to Texas A&M.

I'm from Denton, Texas, and I came to A&M just because some of my friends had gone here and I really wanted the big like SEC experience.

And, why journalism.

My high school journalism teacher, she is like when someone asked me like what I want to be when I grow up, I always say I want to be her.

So that's what she went to school for.

So that's why I'm here.

I like that.

Okay.

So what I like to do is each semester we have a different journalism intern who helps with the show.

And I always try to ask them, what topics are you passionate about and would you like to explore?

Because that gives us an idea of what to work on.

For a series of episodes, you chose today's topic.

Tell us what that is and why you felt it was important.

Today's like conversation is water and water conservation, things like that.

And the reason why I chose it is because, you know, when you come down to College Station, the thing that everyone talks about in August is the water.

And so I was like, there's there's a lot of talk there.

So I feel like it's definitely something we could make an episode out of.

Okay.

All right.

So that's what we're going to do.

All communities, including those throughout the Brazos Valley, are focused on mitigating excessive threats to our healthy and protected water sources.

Our guest today has dedicated most of her professional life to teaching us how to be good stewards of our water.

Jennifer Nations is water resource coordinator for the City of College Station.

She also hosts Waterful Wednesdays segments at 7:42 a.m., on KAMU radio.

She is also wearing for those who are listening to not watching, toilet earrings.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jennifer Nations.

Hey, Jen.

Hi.

That's it.

Hi.

Hello.

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I'm glad you're here.

So we've known each other a really long time, and we even work together for, I think, over a dozen years.

But we've known each other a lot longer than that.

You're the most passionate person I have ever encountered when it comes to water issues.

Would you explain to us what your role is with the city, the professional definition or the way that I like to describe it?

The latter, the way I like to describe it is, drink the dang water and turn your dang sprinklers off.

I like that, that makes sense.

Oh, and don't flush wipes, right?

Right.

So I do a lot of communication to the community about, you know, tap water quality, tap water safety, also irrigation, water conservation and, protecting our wastewater system.

Yeah.

And you have to do that for a pretty wide range of audiences, right.

Like from very young to very old.

Yes.

And it's, it's fun to work with the younger kids.

I have, I got this idea from somebody else, but, from another water nerd, another water communicator.

But, when we have our water field day for fifth grade students, this person has suggested.

Oh, you know, when I give presentations, I wear a poop emoji hat on my head.

And I thought, oh, is that a thing?

Add to cart.

So I did that.

So when we have the fifth graders come out to the wastewater treatment plant, you know, I'll ask them, who wants to talk about poop?

And they're like, yay!

But it's a great way to, you know, they go out there.

It's part of it's a whole day where they're, doing some activities with the Groundwater Conservation District and some other, A&M and extension departments, and then they come to the wastewater treatment plant.

They're going to be our future customers and, you know, possibly future employees.

So let's get them excited about water at a young age.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And the hat really sells it.

Yeah, I bet it does because because without things like that, it could be a pretty boring topic, right?

Yeah.

So you quoted, former coworker, I think of both of ours as once saying the era of easy water is over.

Yeah.

What was that supposed to mean?

That meant.

And that was way back in, I think, 2008.

Dave Coleman, who has gone on to greener pastures.

But yeah, he had said that you know, the era of easy water is over.

We're going to need to be more, judicious with it, more responsible with our use.

And we kind of went along and.

Okay, that's fine.

And we had, increasing block water rates.

We'd started those, I think, in 2008, and then we've had some conservation programs.

But I think in the past couple of years, people are really paying attention now and they're really getting that message.

What was the difference?

I think, the groundwater exports that have happened in the last couple of years, and that all happened way above my pay grade.

But, you know, that's happening.

Corpus Christi is in the headlines.

We're talking about data centers every day.

People are really saying, oh my gosh, this this water stuff is really serious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

The population of ag land is clearly dominated by students.

And I found a 2021, survey from the University of Arkansas that found while 80% of students found that water can't water conservation is important, less than half of them actually practiced it.

And so where do you think that disconnect is, and why is there such a gap between caring about it and actually conserving it?

It could be that at least in this community, many of the students may not be paying the bills or they're not getting that direct price signal.

They're not seeing, you know, I used a lot of water, I paid a lot more water for it.

And they may not know how to conserve water.

Maybe they live in an apartment and if their toilet's leaking and they're not paying the bill, they'll report it to maintenance and maintenance doesn't take care of it.

And they just go, okay, but I think once they get out on their own or if there's a crisis or something, then they may have, they may pay more attention to conservation and look for, like, try to train themselves on how do we do this and like same thing with that.

Like not paying for it a lot.

One of the amenities in student housing right now is water.

Being included in the rent.

So even parents aren't seeing those cost, like you would in a traditional house.

So how do utilities encourage those residents to conserve their water?

Yeah, that sector is has been kind of a tough one for us to crack and a tough message to get across because they're not they're not seeing it.

So what I try to do is just, communicate to the apartment managers and the, apartment, associations.

But even then, sometimes if it's a corporate owned apartment complex, they're paying a bill.

They're using water in College Station.

But the bill is paid by the corporation in, Maine or Massachusetts or something.

So that's tough.

You know, Carly mentioned this a little bit earlier about students coming here from wherever, and, they tend to complain about the water.

Thank you.

So, so the big complaints back when I was doing communications for the city and you were taking care of the public outreach, were your traffic is awful.

Your police are awful, that students not me.

And, your water tastes awful.

Those are the three big complaints.

Consistently.

Yes, but the quality of our water is great, right?

It it is.

We're a superior rated public water system, and not every water system in Texas can say that.

And that falls under.

We're superior because of the quality of it, because of the, operator licensing that we have and the way that we manage our system.

And when TCEQ comes in to inspect us, we've got every, you know, we're checking all the boxes and we've got all the documents that they need.

So it's it's not if a water system is not doing their job on a regular basis, when TCEQ comes in to inspect them, they're not going to meet that inspection.

And if they're not doing their job on a on a consistent basis, they're not going to get that superior rating.

But we have it because we get it.

I mean, we live here, we drink the water.

And we understand that it's an important part of public health.

Yeah, but it's not a case of just believe us when we tell you this.

People, just trust us like they're there are things that that cities are required to do, right?

To demonstrate the, the quality of that water.

Could you talk a little bit about that.

So every year and this is going to be coming out in July of this year.

Utilities have to put out a consumer confidence report, a drinking water quality report, I would say like 90% of the language in there is dictated either by the Environmental Protection Agency or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

So we'll have the opening paragraph, saying we're a superior water system.

We meet all of the drinking water standards.

And then the TCEQ makes you have right below that a paragraph that says, but also it might kill you and so subtle.

Yeah.

So sometimes people read that and they go, oh no, I can't I can't drink this.

And the reports themselves are hard to read because there's so much technical jargon.

So what utilities, including myself, do is we put this report out and then we do a lot of education about like, this is what this means.

This is what, you know, naturally occurring erosion of natural deposits means it's always there.

Like we have to do a lot of translation.

Do you spend more time talking about conservation than you do trying to defend the integrity of the water itself, depending on the time of the year?

Yes.

And that's kind of a weird balance.

And other I've talked to other water professionals about this too.

Is that in what other industry do you have where you're telling people, please consume less of our product?

You know, good point.

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to reintroduce you to the audience if you're just tuning in.

I'm Jay Socol along with KAMU student content contributor Kaleigh Mazy and our guest today is Jennifer Nations, water resource coordinator for the City of College Station.

We're talking about water conservation and how we can protect this resource.

So let's talk about wastewater.

One of the other reasons why I decided to choose this topic is because I remember freshman year, I had to tell my roommate, like, hey, let's not flush that.

So what are the real consequences of flushing things like wipes, hygiene products, or other things that the wastewater systems aren't designed to handle?

The first one is sewer overflows, and that's a direct impact to, the environment and water, you know, surface water quality.

If we have a sewer overflow in, one of our streets that might go into the creek, and then that's going to affect the water quality in the, receiving water body.

It's also an operational cost.

It's, you know, it's over time, it's equipment downtime.

It's, and that's if it gets to the plant, there's also a cost to the customer if the blockage is, it's at their facility.

They may have raw sewage inside their bathroom or apartment or whatever, and that's a health hazard.

And then you have the plumbers charge for that.

So sometimes plumbers will joke with me that they love it when people flush wipes because it's money to them, but they in all honesty, they don't like the wipes either.

College Station.

And it's growing like we have new apartment buildings going up left and right to accommodate more and more people and more businesses going up.

So what, talking about the enormous infrastructure of the city to recruit business and industry and accommodate the pace of growth.

Where does water fall into that conversation?

Water falls into that, conversation in that we'll look at when we're planning.

We'll look at something like living unit equivalence, and that translates into an amount of water.

And when we do our water master planning, we're trying to plan out for how many connections do we think it will have?

How much water, do we need to supply for that?

It also goes back to that superior public water system rating because TCEQ requires a certain amount of water in terms of gallons per connection and pressure for gallons per connection.

So they want to make sure that your water system is functioning.

So and then we have to look at where that water is going to come from.

Most of the time our water, the average daily water demand is going to be like ten, 11 million gallons per day.

We'll look at, in the summertime, the peaks get up to 23, 25 million gallons a day.

And that's really expensive.

So that's another place where conservation comes in.

If we're saving water, then we're not having to put the chemicals in it.

We're not having to run the electricity to run the pumps.

And then that translates into overall savings.

Okay.

And and one of the things that I know we pushed a lot, in terms of messaging to the public, and I'm sure you're, you're still doing that at a, at a brisk pace, especially this time of the year when we're recording this, our irrigation checkups, irrigation system checkups, you literally will go to a college station, home, a customer's home to check out how efficiently they have sprinkler systems set and so forth.

Is that right?

Yes.

Talk about that.

So an irrigation checkup and actually I have one this afternoon.

I will go out to the customer's house.

I find the meter, read the meter.

And sometimes they don't know where they're meters and they don't know how to read it.

So that's the first education step.

Then we go in and look at their controller and I look at, how it's programmed.

There was one time where I found a customer who was using, I think, 200,000 gallons of water in a month, which is.

That's a lot.

That's way too much.

Yeah.

He had I think it was a half acre lot and really nicely landscaped, but it was still too much water.

And he said, oh, the water shouldn't be, the grass shouldn't be wet.

I'm only watering on Monday, Wednesday, Friday or whatever.

Well, he had another program running that was running at night.

And so that's one of the things that I look at is the programs that people don't know about.

And then we'll step through all of the zones and run them for 2 or 3 minutes each.

And I mark, you know, this head's leaking.

This head is spraying the street.

You have, you know, two zones running at the same time or something, and then I'll give and then I'll just do the math.

You're running your system for X number of hours per week.

It uses y gallons per minute.

That's how much of your bill is due to irrigation.

And that opens up the conversation for the person who says, well, I, I don't know how I use this much water.

I haven't touched it all year.

There's no way I could have used this much water.

And I can say, this is how much?

And then I'll give them a suggested irrigation schedule so that they can still have a nice lawn, but they're not using as much water.

How many of these do you do every year?

A few years ago we were doing about 100 per year, and then they kind of really dropped off and in the pandemic and then they have slowly been creeping back up.

So I do about 50, but I would love to get back up to, 100 or so per year.

Are you the only one who does it so far?

I'm the the only one.

And a few years ago when we were doing more, we had, a contract with A&M Agrilife and there were some graduate students doing some research on it as well.

So I had some help.

If I have some help, I can do more than 50.

And these are free.

They are free.

The best person, the person who benefits most from a check up is somebody like the person who didn't understand how they had a 200,000 gallon water bill.

And what can I do about this?

But I do get, calls from people who just want to know more about their irrigation system.

Do you ever get dragged inside the house to take a look at things?

I usually don't like to go and go inside people's houses just because the irrigation check up is on the outside.

But sometimes people say, oh, come on in and have a cup of coffee.

Let's go over the bill or something.

And, and that's fine.

Well, okay.

Yeah.

All right.

That that's interesting.

So in like, our in cities in Texas or outside of Texas are there discussions on how to force changes on the way we landscape and irrigate, through like, ordinances or things like that?

This, this community, the, the I don't want to say the five, but like the I think the prevailing philosophy in this community is more, voluntary or incentivized.

But, Austin offers that they only allow irrigation on 60% of the lot, I think.

And then San Antonio also has some, they built in some regulations into their utility ordinances.

So there are but those are two places where water has been more scarce.

So they've and they've been dealing with that problem for a long time.

And I think their customer base is maybe more, accepting of that, accepting of that.

I think here we'll probably start incentivizing first what things do you think we could possibly see being like incentivized like probably, using native landscaping, not using turf, you know, getting rid of the, what is it called, nonfunctional turf.

So that would be turf.

That's just in a traffic island.

That's just not really serving any purpose.

We could incentivize that.

We have a landscaping ordinance that our development services department does.

And if you have a lot of a certain size, you have to have X number of points.

So we could give more points if somebody didn't have turf or if they didn't have it all irrigated.

Are you talking, residential or commercial?

The, landscaping ordinance only applies to commercial.

Okay.

So right now residential, they can just kind of do whatever, whatever the builder puts in.

But do you, you know, piggybacking off of, Kaleigh's idea, do you ever envision a time where cities in Texas start regulating like a homeowner?

No more than X percentage of your what should be irrigated?

Possibly.

And that would be that would just depend on water availability.

But yeah, we use a lot of you know, I don't want to bash landscapes because landscapes add to a home's value and the esthetic impact.

But, there's when you're irrigating and it's inefficient and the water is running down the street, that's our drinking water running down the street.

Yeah.

So another thing I didn't mention as far as incentives go is we now have a rebate program for, efficient irrigation controllers because there's some controllers out there that are just really hard to program.

And, or they wear out over time.

So if somebody upgrades to, a water certified controller, they can get a rebate of 50% on their utility bill if they put in a rain sensor, they get a rebate for that, or if they upgrade to efficient nozzles.

And that can really easily reduce their, you know, they just make a few changes and then their water use really goes down.

Interesting.

Okay.

Kaleigh, I'll also what I was kind of thinking about is College Station having college students everywhere and like they're not really interested in mowing their own lawns things like that.

Right.

It's like do you think we could see just like when people are building new places, having just automatically making smaller lawns, things like that too?

Yeah.

As a bit more of a benefit for students rather than the utilities itself.

But yeah, it would be less for them to keep up with.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

At the moment when the sustainability of our water supply is being questioned, how can an individual make any kind of meaningful difference?

Yeah, that that can be tough because you can read the headlines and just think, what am I going to do?

But if we have advocates in the community that are saying, you know, not only is this our our water supply, this is our drinking water, the highest, best use of it is drinking water.

We also need that water for fire protection.

And if people are communicating that message, then they get more people to pay attention to their water use.

Building in efficiency standards in like plumbing codes and appliances and things that kind of bakes in some conservation savings as well.

It it does take individual effort.

And then it also takes having advocates at the larger, you know, like at the legislative level or at the city council level saying we need to push conservation, we need to push efficiency.

We've had a real stretch of days and weeks of rainfall, good rainfall.

How much, though, does that really affect our aquifer?

Do we rely on it doesn't have an immediate impact on the aquifer because the Simsboro where we're getting our drinking water from is 3000ft deep, and it's a confined aquifer.

So there's a confining layer above it.

It's not like the Edwards Aquifer or the spring fed rivers in central Texas, where when it rains, they see the water level going up and down.

But what it does do is it lowers overall water demand, because there are people out there who understand that when you get the irrigation from the sky, you don't have to turn your sprinkler system on.

There's still plenty of people based on just my neighborhood who aren't getting that message.

But when we have rainfall, we'll notice, that water drops.

Yeah.

What are you drops?

Okay, so you are the self-proclaimed what?

Water Chick.

Water Chick.

Thanks to the info maniacs for giving me that.

We did that a long, long time ago on a different group of radio stations, but boy, that was a great nickname for you.

I want to know.

And I think Kaleigh does too.

What does water use look like at the Water Chicks house?

Well, like what they like to do that demonstrates true conservation.

I've got, I've got drip irrigation in the front and back flowerbeds.

I will yell at my family to, turn off that.

You know, we fill the pool just with a hose, and, I'll make my husband set a timer so he doesn't just keep it going forever and ever.

I yell at them.

I won't say which, child, but I will go in and shut the shower off for the child who doesn't understand.

How long it takes for the shower to heat up.

She just turns it on and goes.

I'm like, no, no, with the water chicks.

Children do not waste water.

What is the time limit for this?

Like all?

Shut it off after like two minutes and she goes, oh, I forgot.

Okay, child, you cannot.

You of all kids cannot waste water.

Disappointment.

Yeah.

Okay.

What else?

We've got a smart controller, and, What?

We don't water if we.

If we don't need to.

I'll, One thing that I, that I encourage all of my neighbors to do also is, sign up for Water Smart so that we get the weekly alerts that say, hey, we had enough water or enough rain in our landscape.

Excuse me, I can't talk.

We had enough rain in our neighborhood next week.

Last week.

So you don't need to irrigate this week.

And just that simple message, helps people cut back on water use.

How do you sign up for that?

You go to BV water smart.org, type in your address and then you get a confirmation email.

Click that link and then you're set up.

That's pretty great.

What about rain capture.

Do you do any of that?

I don't have that right now.

I should though.

Yeah you should, I should.

Well, you know, Christmas is coming up.

That's right.

Nothing says Merry Christmas like, a rain barrel.

Right.

I have an anniversary coming up too.

I should, I should drop that hint.

You could do his and hers.

Yes.

What other things are you doing at your house that we can learn from.

You know, I'm only, washing full loads.

Well, we have a, full loads in the dishwasher, but then we have a, I got a top loading, washing machine.

We used to have a front loader, but those get kind of stinky.

But the the way that those work is the newer washing machines, they, they have sensors, so they don't just like you turn it on and it just fills the whole thing up.

It senses how much, laundry you have in there, and it'll kind of spray it, circulate the clothes, spray it, circulate the clothes a little bit, and you can look at some standards.

We don't have a WaterSense specification for washing machines, but there is a, energy star specification for water washing machines.

So you can look at that on, to see how little it uses.

One thing that we also could have done, is when we needed to replace our water heater, gotten a tankless like a recirculating water heater, but the plumber just it was it was kind of an emergency repair.

So the plumber just ran out and got one, and he got the big one, and I was like, oh, oops.

Well next time, yeah.

Okay.

So we've got, maybe 90s or so left.

What have we not asked you about that you want to make sure we know?

Let's see, we asked about the irrigation check ups, and I mentioned be we water smart in the rebates.

Changing gears just a bit, I would encourage people to go search up, the Safe Drinking Water Act the next 50 years.

It's a book that's available for free online.

It's really kind of a game changer as far as, like how we're managing our water resources and quality and public trust.

That's a good thing.

Yeah.

What about, if we want to go find the, drinking water quality report on your website, you just go CSTX.gov Forward slash water report.

All one word.

And if anybody wants to request an irrigation checkup from you, just go to CSTX.gov slash water.

That's where you go.

That's where you go.

And we try to put everything there.

Okay.

Listen, thank you so much for being with us.

And, I know this is an important topic for Kaleigh and, it should be an important topic for all of us.

And, you know, you are you are great to give us weekly updates on KAMU as well.

Yeah, I take requests for that.

So if anybody has, suggestions, send it my way.

Kaleigh what do you think?

First one in the books.

And how did they go?

I think it was really fun.

And I really am glad you are our first guest.

This is really.

I love the the younger, you know, younger people than me are getting excited about water, too.

You are the future.

You're the future, Kaleigh That's scary.

It is a little scary.

All right.

Thanks, Jennifer.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Brazos Matters is a production of Aggieland's Public Radio 90.9 Kamu FM.

A member of Texas A&M University's Division of Community Engagement, our show is engineered and edited by Matt Dittman.

All Brazos Matters episodes are available on YouTube and on podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple, iHeart, and Amazon.

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You can also browse the archives that are all on our website as well.

We invite you to do that for Kaleigh Mazy I'm Jay Socol.

Thank you so much for watching and listening.

And we hope you have a great day.