Santa Rosa John F. Shea Federal Building rips out lawn to save water

What looks like a scorched earth campaign in front of Santa Rosa’s John F. Shea Federal Building is actually the start of a project to save an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water a year.

The block-long lawn in front of the building that houses ?the local Internal Revenue Service office and other federal agencies is now stripped to bare brown soil, waiting replacement by drought-tolerant ground cover, shrubs and trees this fall.

A new irrigation system will also be installed in the nearly one-acre lawn on Sonoma Avenue between D and E streets, with the new equipment and vegetation expected to save 778,000 gallons of water annually, according to Andra Hayes, a spokesman for the General Services Administration.

“We also identified approximately $23,000 in annual cost savings,” Hayes said in an email that had to be cleared by officials in Washington, D.C.

The energy and water cost savings will ultimately pay for the project, he said.

About 120 federal employees work at the building, named for Jack Shea, a longtime Democratic Party leader and attorney who died in 1985.

The feds’ investment in water conservation is a match for Santa Rosa’s water-efficiency demonstration garden completed this spring on the north side of City Hall, directly across D Street from the federal building.

The $1 million project includes native plants, permeable concrete walkways, a system that retains and cleanses parking lot runoff and a 22,000-gallon steel tank that captures rainwater from a section of City Hall’s roof.

An $800,000 State Water Resources Control Board grant paid for most of the project.

Meanwhile, Santa Rosa’s “Cash for Grass” rebate program, established in 2007, has helped pay for conversion of 3.5 million square feet of lawn to low water-use landscaping, an area equal to about ?1,400 football fields.

Rebates of more than $1.4 million have been paid to the 2,888 city water customers who have participated in the program, achieving a water savings of about 63 million gallons a year, said Jennifer Burke, deputy director of Santa Rosa Water.

Single-family homes use about 76,000 gallons of water a year, she said.

The drought is over, but Burke said “Cash for Grass” and other city water rebates remain in place.

“We encourage our customers to use water as efficiently as possible,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter?@guykovner.