Apparently Tucson residents just hate the taste of their water and say it is not fit to drink, so therefore they are considering how it should taste through a citizens panel.
The City will set up taste samples and then allow the citizens to decide.
They proposed a rather novel approach.
Rather than going door to door and then allowing people to vote on the water taste of the samples, they will be allowing kiosk machines at the mall to do the voting for them.
You simply go to the mall and taste the water from each sample and pick one and press the button? How simple is that? Which two types will they sample? Well one will be a blend of groundwater and the other will be the water from the Central Arizona Water Project which is a long canal from the Colorado River at the border of the state with California.
The Colorado River water has magnesium, calcium, sulfates and chlorides in it.
The ground water mixture has 450 parts per million of minerals and the Colorado River water has 650 parts per million.
Depending on which one citizens pick they may build a $350 million dollar filtration plant to remove some of the minerals.
Some people say they cannot taste the difference, some say they can.
But also realize that more minerals cause build up in the pipes and that too can change the taste of the water too? Consider all this in 2006.