California’s technically still in a drought, and while there is a push to conserve water by replacing lawns with water-efficient plants or landscapes, you may want to think twice about completely depending on artificial turf—at least in Santa Maria.
All Jiffy Lube franchisee Sean Porcher was trying to do was conserve a little water by replacing the lawn at his shop on Broadway Street with artificial turf.
The city wasn’t a fan of that development and issued him a notice on Jan. 4, ordering him to replace the turf with living grass or else he’ll be fined $2,500 per day up to $100,000. The compliance order stated that city code requires at least 15 percent of a landscape to be “living,” landscape shouldn’t be “construed to mean artificial turf,” and Jiffy Lube needs to submit a new landscape plan to the city by Jan. 15.
In an open letter Porcher posted on his Facebook page, he wrote that he consulted with his district manager to find a way to redo the landscaping at four of their seven locations on the Central Coast. All together, they spent 14 days and nearly $30,000 to pay for laborers, rental equipment, artificial turf, recycled rubber mulch, and even some “nicer” drought resistant plants, according to the letter.
“They’re giving us basically 11 days to undo all that work,” Porcher told the Sun. “Hopefully the city will at least give us a little more time.”
Turf also went in at locations in Arroyo Grande, San Luis Obispo, and Goleta without backlash from the cities’ respective code compliance departments. Porcher said all of those cities have strict water restrictions in place, and because he saw other local businesses using turf as a landscaping alternative, he never thought to question what Santa Maria’s codes allowed.
Porcher redesigned his landscape under the assumption that Santa Maria was required to reduce water consumption by 25 percent as mandated by Gov. Jerry Brown, but Brian Halvorson from the city informed him Santa Maria doesn’t have that restriction. According to the city’s website, Santa Maria was ordered to reduce water usage by only 16 percent.
“In hindsight, I guess that would have been a thing to look at, but I never thought in a million years that the city wouldn’t allow drought-tolerant landscape,” he said.
The only way to know these requirements is to dig through the city code, or call city officials and ask them.
City Planning Division Manager Peter Gilli said artificial turf hasn’t been allowed as landscaping along major city streets such as Broadway since 1976, and that’s been in place through several droughts.
“We at the city are fully in support of drought-tolerant landscaping,” he said. “We don’t call artificial turf landscaping, though. … Artificial turf has a lot of drawbacks that people don’t even realize.”
Some of those unintentional side effects include bacteria buildup and increased water runoff, according to a poster titled “The City’s Guide to Drought Tolerant Landscape.”
Gilli said the city notified Jiffy Lube it was out of compliance in October, and only served the compliance order after communication between the parties went silent. But the franchise isn’t the only turf-fronted business in the city that has noncompliant landscaping. Sizzlin’ Gogi across Broadway also is out of compliance.
“We are aware of a handful of them. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have been fined,” Gilli said, adding that they don’t want to fine Porcher either and are willing to work with him to get Jiffy Lube’s landscaping into compliance—including being flexible on deadlines.
He said, as far as he knows, no one has asked the city to change the turf law yet, and the city didn’t have any plans to do so.
“But at the same time, anybody has the ability to ask the city to change,” he said.
This article appears in Jan 7-14, 2016.