City officials may be correct that granting incentives for home cistern systems isn’t a financially viable option right now, but there’s a good idea in there somewhere, and we suspect it will seem even better as time goes on.

As the Record-Chronicle’s Lowell brown reported in Saturday’s paper, city officials have reacted coolly to a suggestion from the Home Builders Association of Greater Dallas that incentives be granted to developers that install “rainwater-harvesting” systems in new developments. These systems use what we country folks used to call cisterns to catch and hold rainwater in times of heavy precipitation for use during more arid periods.

Water from old-time cisterns was used for everything from drinking to washing; modern recovery systems tend to be used for irrigating landscaping in the summertime.

The home builders suggested such incentives as rebates or reductions in drainage impact fees and water rates to encourage the use of water-saving cisterns. The city reportedly studied the matter and concluded that such a program wouldn’t cut water use appreciably, and would be unfair to the vast majority of homeowners who don’t have such a system. The city even went so far as to rescind a previously offered impact-fee reduction to the Nevada Court subdivision, a Denton Affordable Housing Corp. project that is using such recovery systems in 14 “environmentally friendly” houses to be built there.

We will take the city’s word for the economic viability of the proposed incentives — for now. But we predict there will come a time when the idea will seem not only sensible, but essential, and we’d bet that time will be sooner rather than later.

State governments have been aware for several years now of the importance of water conservation; counties, cities and towns have been slower to catch up, although some of them seem to be wiping the cobwebs out of their eyes at last. Drainage impact fees and tree ordinances that discourage the clear cutting of development property are both ways of dealing with the problem.

So is encouraging the use of environmentally friendly landscaping, the kind that uses attractive native grasses and other plants that don’t need nearly as much watering as the traditional “putting green” lawns that have long been the standard for good housekeeping in residential areas.

As Denton looks for ways for its residents to conserve water, we think it would be shortsighted to ignore the use of cisterns that store rainwater.

Granted, there are drawbacks. The systems are expensive at this time, adding about $4,000 to the cost of a house. An aboveground unit is a big, honking thing, and ugly to boot.

But the collection tanks can be buried, or at the very least snugged up against the backside of the house alongside that tacky corrugated steel tool shed that houses the lawnmower and the leaf blower.

We will, as we said, give the city the benefit of the doubt in declining the homebuilders’ association proposal for the time being. But we wonder about the wisdom of reneging on its offer of an incentive to Denton Affordable Housing. The whole idea of these 14 environmentally friendly houses was meant as something of a pilot program, and we see no reason why the city couldn’t have participated by offering the rebate as part of the experiment.

We think there will come a time when the city will be begging developers to include water recovery systems in their projects, if not requiring it. We hope its present reticence to embrace the concept backfire on down the road.