Kane County wants you to start saving water

Kane County officials want residents to embrace water conservation as enthusiastically as they've supported recycling.

To that end they plan to develop a countywide water conservation educational program to promote the issue among students, residents and community leaders.

The county board's development committee directed staff Tuesday to apply for a $40,000 riverboat grant to fund the program, which will be developed by officials from the county and the Chicago-based nonprofit group Alliance for Water Efficiency.

"Water conservation gives us increased water supplies for the future and reduces the need for the capital investment in expensive infrastructure to meet peak and total volume water demands," county Water Resources Director Paul Schuch wrote in a memo to the committee.

Rapid population growth has depleted local water resources. Without a strategy to identify, manage and maintain the water supply, demand could exceed supply by the year 2030, county board Chairman Karen McConnaughay told some 300 engineers and local elected officials at a water supply conference earlier this year.

County officials hope to have a clearer picture of local water needs when a $1.8 million water modeling project is completed next year. The Illinois State Water Survey and Illinois State Geologic Survey have spent the last five years analyzing data and compiling information into a computer model that will be delivered to the county June 30.

The model was supposed to be delivered by the end of 2007, but on Tuesday the committee approved a no-cost six-month extension requested by water survey officials. This is the second extension county officials have approved. The study was funded partly by a $938,000 federal grant.