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Project Grade 9 Social Studies & Civics

Drafting Ashperton's Four-Stage Drought Ordinance

A four-session grade 9 project in which teams write a staged drought ordinance for a fictional town board, including enforcement, equity, and a revenue memo.

Objectives

  1. Students will write ordinance language that ties each drought stage to a stated numeric trigger.
  2. Students will design an enforcement mechanism that a two-person staff could actually carry out.
  3. Students will explain how falling water sales affect utility revenue and propose a response.

Vocabulary

Drought surcharge
An extra fee added to water bills during a drought. It encourages people to use less water and replaces money the utility loses when everyone conserves.

Also: ordinance, trigger, fixed cost, variance

Teacher overview

Drought ordinances look simple from the outside: when the reservoir drops, stop watering lawns. Writing one is harder, because every stage has to name a measurable trigger, a rule someone can enforce, a penalty a court would uphold, and an answer for households that cannot absorb the cost. The misconception this project is built to correct is that saving water saves the utility money. Most of a water system's costs are fixed, so when sales fall the revenue falls with them and the fixed costs stay, which is why real drought stages usually arrive with a surcharge attached. Teams draft a four-stage ordinance for the fictional town of Ashperton and defend it at a board hearing.

Drafting Ashperton's Four-Stage Drought Ordinance — Grade 9 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Project Brief

Driving question: What should a town be allowed to require of its residents as its reservoir falls, and who should pay for the shortfall that follows?

Client and audience. Your team is a policy working group hired by the Ashperton Town Board. The town, its reservoir, its utility, and every figure in this brief are fictional, written for this project. You will present to the board in the final session, and the board will vote on your ordinance.

The situation. Ashperton has 12,400 residents and 4,800 water accounts. The town draws from one reservoir. Over the last three summers the reservoir has fallen further each August than the year before. The town has no drought ordinance at all. Right now the utility asks residents to conserve and has no authority to require anything.

Reservoir data sheet. All figures are fictional.

  • Reservoir capacity: 600 million gallons.
  • End-of-August storage, three summers ago: 71 percent of capacity. Two summers ago: 63 percent. Last summer: 54 percent.
  • In a dry summer, storage falls about 6 percentage points of capacity per month from June through September.
  • Account mix (4,800 total): 4,310 single-family homes, 260 apartment and multifamily buildings, 180 businesses, 20 schools and town buildings, and 30 irrigation-only accounts for parks and athletic fields.
  • Annual utility revenue: $3,200,000.

Background figures you may use. EPA WaterSense reports that the average US household uses about 300 gallons of water per day, roughly 70 percent of it indoors, and that a standard showerhead flows at 2.5 gpm while labeled models use 2.0 gpm or less. A widely used rule of thumb, built by adding two EPA benchmarks (2.5 percent for drinking water and 2 percent for wastewater), treats combined water and sewer costs above roughly 4.5 percent of household income as a high burden, although EPA has no single official cutoff. Any other number you use must come from the fictional town data sheet or be labeled as your team's estimate.

What the ordinance must contain.

  • Four stages, numbered 1 through 4, each tied to a numeric trigger stated in percent of reservoir capacity, plus the name of the official who declares the stage.
  • For each stage, the specific uses restricted and the specific uses still allowed. Write these as rules, not as requests.
  • One enforcement table covering all four stages: who observes a violation, what notice the household receives, and what the penalty is for a first and a second violation.
  • An equity provision naming what happens to a household that cannot pay a drought surcharge, and how a household applies for that relief.
  • A variance clause stating who may apply for an exception and on what grounds.
  • A Stage 4 provision stating whether treated wastewater from the fictional town plant may be hauled for construction dust control and athletic field irrigation, and what permit that would require.

Constraints your ordinance must respect.

  • Enforcement uses the existing staff of two field employees. You may not add positions.
  • New spending caused by the ordinance may not exceed $85,000 a year.
  • Volume charges provide 62 percent of the fictional utility's revenue. Fixed charges provide the rest.
  • The ordinance must fit on four pages in the template provided.

What your team turns in. A four-page ordinance, a one-page revenue memo estimating what happens to utility revenue at Stage 3 and naming your team's response, and a six-minute presentation to the board followed by two board questions.

Milestones

  1. Session 1, conditions and criteria. Read the reservoir data sheet and the fictional town's account mix. Produce a one-page criteria sheet naming the measure your triggers will use, where that measure is read and how often, and the groups affected at each stage. Name at least one group that a lawn-watering restriction would not touch at all.
  2. Session 2, stages 1 and 2 and enforcement. Draft ordinance text for Stages 1 and 2, each with its trigger, its declaring official, its restricted uses, and its allowed uses. Complete the enforcement table for all four stages and check it against the two-employee limit. Turn in the draft text and the table.
  3. Session 3, stages 3 and 4, equity, and revenue. Draft Stages 3 and 4, including the hauled reuse provision, the equity provision, and the variance clause. Write the one-page revenue memo estimating the revenue effect at Stage 3 given that volume charges supply 62 percent of revenue, and state your response, whether a surcharge, a reserve draw, or a deferred project.
  4. Session 4, board hearing. Present for six minutes, then answer two questions from the board. Submit the final ordinance within the four-page limit, with any changes you made after the questions marked in the margin.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Rubric
Criterion 1, Emerging 2, Developing 3, Proficient 4, Advanced
Triggers and evidence Stages are described in words such as "severe" with no numeric trigger. Some stages have numeric triggers; the measure or the declaring official is missing. All four stages have numeric triggers in percent of reservoir capacity, a named measure, and a named declaring official. Triggers are numeric and spaced so that each stage buys a stated amount of time, with the reasoning shown from the fictional data sheet.
Restrictions, enforcement, and equity Restrictions are requests; no enforcement table; no equity provision. Restrictions are rules but the enforcement table exceeds what two employees could do, or equity relief is mentioned without a way to apply. Restrictions are written as rules, the enforcement table fits the two-employee limit, and the equity provision states both the relief and the application path. All of level 3, and the team names a group its own restrictions would burden unfairly and answers that in the ordinance text.
Revenue analysis No revenue memo, or the memo asserts that saving water saves the utility money. The memo notes revenue falls but does not use the 62 percent figure or propose a response. The memo estimates the Stage 3 revenue effect using the 62 percent share and names a specific response. The memo estimates the effect, names a response, and states who bears the cost of that response and for how long.
Presentation and response Reads the ordinance aloud, exceeds time, does not answer board questions. Keeps roughly to time, answers one question with material from the draft. Presents within six minutes, answers both board questions from the ordinance text. Presents within time, answers both questions, and marks a specific change to the ordinance in response to one of them.

Differentiation

Support

Give these teams a partly completed ordinance template with Stage 1 written out in full as a model, using a fictional town other than Ashperton, so the shape of a stage is visible before they draft their own. Provide the enforcement table with the column headings and the first row filled in, and allow the revenue memo to be delivered as a labeled bar sketch with three sentences.

Extension

Ask these teams to add a fifth section setting out how the fictional ordinance ends, naming the trigger for lifting each stage and whether the surcharge stops on the same day the restriction does. Teams may also draft the one-page notice the town would mail to every account when Stage 2 is declared, written at a reading level a general audience can use.

ELL supports

Pre-teach "ordinance," "trigger," "variance," and "surcharge" with a stair-step diagram showing the four stages of the fictional ordinance and the reservoir level beside each step. Provide ordinance sentence frames such as "Upon a finding that reservoir storage has fallen below ___ percent, the ___ shall declare Stage ___," and allow the board presentation to be delivered from a written script.

Extensions

Students find the drought or water shortage ordinance their own city, town, or water district has adopted, using only the municipal code posted online, and write a paragraph comparing its number of stages and its triggers with the fictional Ashperton ordinance their team wrote. A second option is to hold a second hearing in which three students play residents affected by different stages and deliver public comment before the board votes.