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With Milwaukee experiencing a boom in urban agriculture, the city’s Department of Public Works is moving to shut off a common source of water – fire hydrants. DPW says it plans to stop issuing permits for gardeners to tap into hydrants, citing concerns over safety, dirty backflow and lack of metering. Critics say this would stifle urban agriculture in the city by driving up water costs.

In December, the Milwaukee Water Works sent a letter to the UW-Extension, which runs a garden rental program with about 2,000 plots in Milwaukee, Oak Creek and Wauwatosa, saying hydrant permits for gardeners would end in 2011. “That came as a shock to us,” says Dennis Lukaszewski, urban gardening coordinator for UW-Extension.

After hearing objections, the city agreed to set no specific timeline for cutting off the permits and to meet with the UW-Extension and urban gardening leaders Wednesday. One of those leaders, Gretchen Mead of the city’s Victory Garden Initiative, an urban agriculture outreach program, says banning hydrant use by gardeners “will stunt the growth of the urban agriculture movement.”

Paying a relatively small fee to tap into an unmetered hydrant is a common practice at community gardens that spring up on vacant lots in the city. Lukaszewski says a hydrant permit for a small garden costs only about $75 a year. The city is still issuing the permits, but, “They’ll be phased out gradually once alternative methods of getting water to gardens have been devised and are being implemented,” says Cecilia Gilbert, manager of permits and communications at DPW.

The hookups used by gardeners tie up hydrants for entire growing seasons and can obstruct firefighters, she says. “If the hydrant is needed for firefighting, it costs precious seconds to firefighters to turn the hydrant off and disconnect the gardening setup before they can hook up their hoses and start fighting a fire.”

City officials are also concerned by the lack of backflow prevention – which would prevent dirty water from contaminating clean water in the system – and metering on most hydrants used at community gardens. Gilbert says safety is also an issue. “There are instances of inappropriate use, and there is risk of injury from loose caps,” she says, calling such an accident a “low probability but high consequence event.”

DPW isn’t optimistic about continuing hydrant use for gardening but charging more. “When you add the backflow prevention and metering requirements, the tariff basically becomes too expensive for gardeners,” Gilbert says. Gardeners can purchase water at the city’s bulk filling station, 1901 South Kinnickinnic Ave. DPW plans to build another such station on the north side next year, most likely at a water works facility at 2919 W. Cameron Ave.

Lukaszewski says the water source for the Extension’s 10 acre community garden in Wauwatosa is metered and racks up about $3,000 a year in charges. The Extension makes some of that money back, he says, with a small water surcharge tacked onto the bills of gardeners who rent plots.

Oak Creek’s water utility, he says, requires metering and backflow prevention on two of its hydrants used by Extension gardens. Most of those in the City of Milwaukee, however, rely on unmetered hydrants.

Water lines were built for a new garden at 6^th Street and Howard Avenue on the city’s south side, according to Lukaszewski, and cost about $6,000. “If you’re looking at a lot of these little gardens that come and go on city lots, you’re not going to dump $6,000 on that,” he says.

But Lukaszewski and other urban gardening leaders say the end of unmetered hydrants could ultimately be a good thing – leading to innovation and greater water conservation. “We’ve been forced to do this, so maybe cool things will come of it,” he says.

Walnut Way Conservation Corp., a community group on the city’s north side, operates a pair of community gardens close to North 17^th Street and North Avenue watered by rain cisterns, a method often promoted by urban gardeners as an alternative to hydrant watering. Sharon Adams, president of the group, proposes that the old city water lines lying under many vacant lots, the former sites of homes, could be used to build relatively inexpensive water hookups.

Community gardeners can also use a neighbor’s garden hose – and negotiate a payment plan, an approach suggested by Milwaukee Urban Gardens, a nonprofit that purchases or leases land for community gardens.

Jan Christensen, a YMCA Community Development Center community organizer, is surveying how many community gardens use city hydrants to present the information at Wednesday’s meeting. She says community gardeners have really grown in numbers in the past two years, and hopes they can find common ground with the city.

“The Water Works is very willing to work with gardeners,” she says. “There’s a need to find some alternatives. We need to have a community conversation about this.”

Meeting on water supplies for community gardening

Wednesday, 6 p.m.

Independence First

540 S. 1st St., Milwaukee

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