The City of Fort Worth has made amendments to its irrigation ordinance, aimed at tightening up the enforcement of water usage for irrigation. A recent City News release outlines the newly adopted changes, which grant the Water director or their appointee the authority to lock or shut off water service to systems or meters that are repeat offenders or those that pose risks to public safety, health, or welfare.
Why should you care? Well, these changes are meant to level out the demand for water, and more importantly, decrease per-capita water use. This is critical for maintaining the operational reliability of the city’s water system, and it’s also a step towards the conservation goals the City Council committed to in its 2024 Conservation Plan. Despite past efforts to nudge residents towards compliance via education and outreach, the impact on average and peak water demand was less than stellar. Even the introduction of fines for commercial and residential customers in March seemed to be only a partial deterrent, as violations persisted substantially.
The terms are pretty clear: water once or twice a week and never between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. — that’s the City’s Irrigation Ordinance in a nutshell. The new rulings mean business for repeat violators. We’re talking a step-by-step punitive approach that starts with a friendly written notice, complete with savvy irrigation scheduling info and escalates to locking mechanisms on your water meter — not your backflow device, sorry, commercial folks. It’s a tiered sequence of administrative fees, ratcheting up with each offense: starting at $25, then hiking to $50, and $75 for the especially hard-headed…