Tri-City residents who don't want to run afoul of new regional sprinkling restrictions should water their lawns only in the wee morning hours.
By doing so, they'll comply with Metro Vancouver's new Water Shortage Response Plan - even though local city regulations have yet to be updated.
Metro Vancouver approved a new policy to outlaw evening and night-time lawn sprinkling but most cities - including Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam - have yet to amend their bylaws to keep up with the new dictum. The result is a patchwork of rules and information across the Tri-Cities.
The new Metro regs dictate summer sprinkling is only allowed between 4 and 9 a.m., with even-numbered addresses allowed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and odd-numbered on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.
The cities haven't yet caught up, though.
Coquitlam is advising residents to stick with old regional rules while PoCo's website has the old rules but is advising residents to adhere to the new morning-only rules, as is Port Moody.
"We've advised residents that while recent city publications, such as the annual calendar, carry the old sprinkling regulations, new regulations are in effect from June 1 of this year," said PoMo's communications advisor, Leslyn Johnson.
PoCo's website is being updated for the new regulations, said city spokesperson Pardeep Purewal.
Coquitlam, meanwhile, is recommending no change because council has yet to update its sprinkling bylaw.
"It will be confusing for people," the city's communications manager, Dan McDonald, admitted, but he said bylaws and enforcement are the city's responsibility and this one is "still before council."
Last week, Coquitlam council reviewed the proposed bylaw changes but sent them back to staff for more information, Port Moody won't be addressing the issue until June 14 and PoCo's environmental services committee has approved the changes but council has yet to deal with it.
Until local bylaws catch up with the new policy, residents should stick to early morning watering.
According to Metro Vancouver, the change is needed to clamp down on water use during peak evening hours. While Metro has plenty of drinking water in its reservoirs, it still struggles to deliver enough water to the edges of the region at peak times during the season for things such as firefighting - and adding more capacity for lawn sprinkling would be wasteful, Metro Vancouver says.
"[The water committee] would rather defer that capital investment and use it for more other important things other than insuring unfettered access for the purpose of pouring it on the lawn," said Metro Van spokesperson Bill Morrell, who noted that the new rules allow for 15 hours of water sprinkling each week even though only one hour a week is needed to keep lawns green during dry spells.
Morning sprinkling is also better, he said, because there is less evaporation.
Meanwhile, the plan is to educate residents for a year before the new rules are enforced in 2012.
Beside changes to residential lawn sprinkling, businesses and institutions are limited to sprinkling to between 1 and 6 a.m. -even-numbered addresses on Mondays and Wednesdays, odd-numbered on Tuesdays and Thursdays; and all non-residential properties may sprinkle from 4 to 9 a.m. on Fridays.
