| We need you to contact your senators today to get them to influence the turf reduction section of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) WaterSense Program, and stop it from becoming part of the International Code Council’s model-building code, which could be adopted in your community. PLANET and the newly formed National Hispanic Landscape Alliance are working to get signatures by close of business today, so please act now. Click here to access a template letter to your senators asking them to join Sen. Marco Rubio (FL) in his request to the EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to reconsider the turfgrass criteria in the WaterSense program. Click here to read the letter Sen. Rubio will be sending to Administrator Jackson. The WaterSense program includes voluntary specifications for water-efficient, single-family new homes and, within those specifications, the EPA has included turfgrass recommendations for new homebuilders. Specifically, in December 2009, the EPA issued a report titled “Research Report on Turfgrass Allowance,” that encourages homebuilders to install water-efficient landscapes in new homes and gives them “the option of designing the landscaped area to use a regionally appropriate amount of water ... or to design the landscaped area to contain no more than 40 percent turfgrass.” We know the EPA’s turfgrass limitations fail to acknowledge the many environmental benefits of increased turfgrass use. Furthermore, we’re concerned that these restrictions will have negative impacts on our industry. While the limitations are currently voluntary, specifications could be adopted as mandatory requirements in state building codes and are already being considered, at the EPA’s request, by the International Code Council for inclusion in the International Green Construction Code. For these reasons, we want you to ask your senators to ask the EPA to reconsider its specifications and to provide to their offices what considerations it has made on the economic impacts of these turfgrass limitations. To prevent the WaterSense turf limitations from becoming part of the International Code Council’s model-building code, we need your help right now! Click here to access the template letter to your senators. Thank you, Tom Delaney Director of Government Affairs Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) (800) 395-2522 (703) 736-9668 (fax) |
