A California city is implementing a unique program to help encourage people to replace their traditional lawns with other things.
According to KSBY, the city of Santa Barbara, California, is offering a cash rebate program to encourage citizens to implement "water-wise gardens" that capture and filter stormwater.
The gardens serve a dual purpose. They reduce your water bills by requiring far less water than a traditional monocultural lawn, but they also help to keep stormwater out of street drains and gutters.
"Ordinarily, stormwater runs off from your roofs, from your driveway, runs down into the street, into the curb and gutter, into a storm drain and eventually right to our creeks and ocean untreated," said Erin Markey with Santa Barbara's Creeks Division.
Those waters often pick up toxins and chemicals off the street, further polluting the sensitive ocean ecosystem.
Hence, the new program. It offers homeowners $3 per square foot to replace traditional lawns with water-wise plants and an additional $2 per square foot to create rain gardens, which can combine with the replacement rebate to get you $5 per square foot.
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Madeline Wood of the Santa Barbara Association of Realtors' headquarters says homeowners have already started raking in big money and big savings with the program.
"They reduced their water use by 79%," Markey said. "Customers can save money on their water bill by reducing their water use with a low-water-use landscape."
The plan works because traditional monoculture lawns aren't remotely environmentally friendly. They typically use breeds of grass that aren't native to the regions where they're being planted, meaning they require far more water than native plants would and do little to help hold water in the soil because of the way their root structures are set up.
By shifting to native lawns and plants that help trap water in the soil better, you reduce the amount of watering you need to do to help keep your lawn and garden beautiful all year long, while also helping to reduce pollution in the oceans.
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"We get improved water quality, we get improved resiliency against flooding but also drought, as we're kind of using that water to irrigate environments that otherwise would use potable water," Markey said.
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