www.badlandsjournal.com/cvsen?page=4 -
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Published on: 10/7/2008
Last Visited: 8/30/2008
DiPrima and Sierra Development Group president Dan Otter, who has built shopping centers in the Antelope Valley, point to Las Vegas as a model for reducing water use.
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Otter, who now lives in Nevada, said he and his family moved into a new home that featured landscape with rock and low water-use plants, plus a small grass area in the backyard for his kids to play on.His summer water bill dropped 80% from $500 to $100. "The only thing I can attribute it to is all the watering I had at my old house, so it's been a huge, huge difference," he said. Otter said his commercial projects in California and Nevada include water-conserving landscapes. "We've gone to a lot more low-water types of plantings, getting rid of all the turf, and putting in more rock, plants that can be watered on bubblers, very much in that direction," he said. "From a commercial standpoint, I think it's great.It's less maintenance cost, it's less water cost; there's long-term benefits for everybody." Otter's company also recently installed "purple pipe" at a new Riverside County commercial center.The pipe will eventually tie in to a recycled water system to irrigate the landscaping. Home builders in the past resisted installing less-thirsty landscaping, he said. "The psychological view that they had of what prospective buyers wanted to see was the curb appeal of a home, wanting to have this green beltway in the front of these brand-new homes," Otter said. "Initially some of the home builders over in the Las Vegas area had that concern, but after it became a regulation that they had to do xeriscape landscaping and it had to be the natural material in the front of housing, the marketplace accepted it." While they say they are working on reducing water use, builders warn that halting home construction would hurt the Valley's economy. "If you had any type of moratorium, whether it was driven by water, or anything else, you're going to constrict growth and you're going to constrict retailers wanting to be in that marketplace.Because they're not only building for today, they're building for tomorrow and for future growth," said Otter, whose company helped bring Trader Joe's and Circuit City to the Amargosa Commons commercial center in Palmdale. "Anything that's going to slow down residential is definitely going to impact commercial and industrial, because if you don't have affordable, available housing for people to live in, you're not going to have employees that will attract the companies to resettle to the Antelope Valley," he said.
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And it would behoove us to try to develop long-term solutions now while there is a break in the action of the normal growth patterns in the Antelope Valley and in Southern California," Otter said.
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