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Why conserve water when what's saved goes to serve more growth?

That question has hung over the city's water-conservation debate for years.

Even though statistics show that many Tucson-area residents have indeed cut back from their use a decade ago, people continue to write letters and speak out at meetings that they see little point in conserving if newcomers keep moving in and slurping up the savings.

Now, a University of Arizona water-research center wants to offer an alternative to ensure that saving water is helping the region's long-dry rivers and streams.

"Conserve to Enhance" is a proposed program in which people who save water could set aside the money they saved by using less water to restore long-barren rivers or streams. It's been under study for some time by the UA's Water Resources Research Center.

Three Tucson City Council members have recently indicated interest in it: Regina Romero, Rodney Glassman and Karin Uhlich. Their staffers met Tuesday to discuss it.

"If you don't connect people's conservation to actual restoration, they rightfully might perceive a disconnect — what are you conserving for?" said Mac Hudson, an aide to Romero.

"It will have to be a pilot program," he added. "It will have to go slowly. We don't know if it is a viable option, but we are willing to take the time to find out if it is viable."

There is enough interest that the council aides will meet again on the idea and will try to take it next to a City Council subcommittee, Hudson said after Tuesday's session.

However, Tucson Water officials, concerned about the Conserve to Enhance program's cost and its potential complexity, have not embraced it.

"We're not pursuing it until it becomes something that there is a lot of interest in, something that the mayor and council want us to move forward on," said Mitch Basefsky, a Tucson Water spokesman.

The UA water-research center has shopped the idea around at seminars, in a research paper and at meetings with various interest groups and Tucson Water officials. It is trying to interest other Arizona cities, such as Prescott and Flagstaff.

The program's purpose is not to slow growth but to encourage more conservation, center officials said. They envision that it would be a voluntary program, employing a checkoff or other tool on water bills for ratepayers to direct the money savings to restoration.

Another driving force behind the program is the need to find water for environmental restoration projects now springing up around the state that would create or re-create river or wetland habitats along rivers, streams and lakes.

A 2006 study by the water center's director, Sharon Megdal, found that 80 percent of 30 such projects need an outside source of water.

Here's how program supporters envision it would work:

A water utility would establish a water budget for each customer, to learn how much water a given home or business has used over a specific period.

Then, if the resident or business owner reduced water use, he or she could decide to pay the same amount as before and have the extra money diverted to a restoration project.

The most likely targets for the money would be planned programs such as Paseo de las Iglesias or Tres Rios. Those are long-discussed, multimillion-dollar city and county efforts that propose to plant thousands of mesquite and other trees along the Santa Cruz River to restore a touch of its historic ambience.

Backers of the idea don't know what kind of water would be used for these programs. But because it's long been clear that reclaimed water would be a major source used to irrigate the trees, Conserve to Enhance wouldn't necessarily affect drinkable water supplies, said Joanna Bate, a research associate at the UA research center.

The program probably would work best if it used an established restoration project, and it would simply provide money to secure a water supply, backers say. That would be simpler than starting a new project that would have to get the trees and set up a new administrative structure, backers say.

"But I don't think it's easy to say without a specific project in mind what kind of water it would be," Bate said. "The important thing is that we want to encourage conserving water, so we can reach people who might otherwise not think about conservation because the water goes to growth."

The program will work best if it's kept simple, so the public can easily grasp its purpose, backers wrote in a peer-reviewed paper in January in the American Water Works Association's journal.

To increase the public's trust in how the money is being spent, an independent board should be given the power to make spending decisions, the paper said.

It would require active participation and support from the local water utility, wrote authors Megdal, the UA center's director, and Andrew Schwartz, a former center graduate student who now is an engineer for the California Department of Water Resources.

Some questions are:

● What type of water would be used, since using drinkable supplies would divert water from people?

● Would conservation cut utility revenues?

● How would use of rivers and streams as water customers affect competition for scarce supplies?

● Is the utility's billing system adequate to handle the additional number-crunching for this program?

Tucson Water officials had other questions.

"When you boil this down to its basic premise, it's people donating money for a cause," said David Cormier, the city's new finance director, who reviewed this proposal as business services administrator for Tucson Water.

"Granted, they tie that to conservation, but does it make sense to go through a rather extensive process for an individual to say, 'I'd like to donate $10 to this cause'?"

Setting up the program would require Tucson Water to track every customer's historical water-use patterns so the utility could calculate conservation savings, utility officials said.

"It would be an expensive, difficult process," Tucson Water spokesman Basefsky said.

But Councilman Glassman said it's an idea worth checking out.

"Anything that we can do to facilitate more water conservation in our community is something that should be explored," he said. "I'm confident that as a community, we can come up with creative and cost-effective ways to promote conservation of water."

The researchers aren't trying to say that this is a simple idea without costs, Megdal said.

"Let's try to figure out a way of doing it, of offsetting some of those costs," she said.