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Photo credits: News Enterprise
Frances Robles, left, digs a hole for Katie Reed to place a plant in at Bourns in Riverside, Friday, April 24, 2015. Bourns employees are planting trees and shrubs to put the finishing touches on transforming more than 3.3 acres of corporate lawn into a drought-tolerant landscape with walking paths and exercise areas.
KURT MILLER, photographer
Drought: Cash-for-turf program brings changes and challenges
The trend of converting lawns to drought-tolerant landscaping is growing, but there are also criticisms of removing the turf.
Richard K. de Atlee
There is also a fault line here: California is in the fourth year of a historic drought. More than half of the city’s water is used for landscape irrigation.
As part of a campaign to reduce water use, water agencies across the state, including Riverside Utilities, are offering rebates to homeowners and businesses to help them remove lawns and replace them with drought-tolerant plants.
“Essentially, what Governor Brown announced is a turf war,” said Girish Balachandran, general manager of Riverside Public Utilities, who said the RPU program, which was set to end in mid-May, would “almost certainly” be extended.
The situation is getting worse. In Riverside, the main players are businesses and local government, and these customers have removed more than twice as much lawn as homeowners since the beginning of 2014.
Companies receive a $3 per square foot lawn rebate ($2 for homeowners), and businesses such as Bourns and Kaiser Riverside Medical Center are using landscaping changes as community showcases.
Other large projects include Metal Container Corp., Canyon Crest Towne Center and ATI Windows.
The Riverside Public Works Department has already cleared 244,000 square feet of lawn on land under its jurisdiction and is currently contracted to clear an additional 1 million square feet of lawn, with the goal of clearing lawn from medians throughout the city.
Read the full article: News Enterprise
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