TONTITOWN, Ark. — The City of Tontitown is currently looking at amending part of the town's municipal code to enact water conservation regulations.
For the last five years, the city has purchased water from the Benton Washington Regional Public Water Authority. However, the supplier is undergoing an expansion and is recommending its participating towns to create a water conservation plan due to delays in the project.
"The whole area is growing. The expansion of the water treatment plant is not going fast enough to be able to get water out of the plant and into their transmission lines and into their storage tanks," said James Clark, Director of Public Works for the City of Tontitown. "The manager feels like within the next two summers, that if growth continues the way it is, we're going to maybe be hitting sometimes when we need to have conservation measures in place."
Clark said these conservation efforts are a way to plan just in case there's an emergency. The city currently doesn't have any water conservation regulations in place. Right now, the city relies on voluntary efforts when there's an issue.
"We need a way, or a mechanism that we can get people to cut back on their usage a little bit," Clark said. "We would put it out on social media and contact the radio and have it put out there, and just hope that people will go along with it. Voluntary efforts are usually not that great, as a matter of fact, usually when you put out a conservation effort, water usage goes up."
This would be a three-tier system — the lowest tier would be voluntary conservation with the highest tier being no excessive use of water.
The lower tiers would limit or even prohibit the watering of lawns, shrubs, plants, trees, and gardens, and the washing of motor vehicles would be prohibited, as well as the washing of sidewalks, walkways, driveways, patios, parking lots, hard-surfaced tennis courts, and other hard-surfaced areas by use of water directly from faucets or other city sources.
Clark said violators of the highest tier could face penalties.
"If level three were ever enacted and someone were in violation of it, it says the Director of Public Works or designated representative shall terminate water service of any customer upon reasonable notice of seven days," Clark said.
Some Tontitown councilmembers believe the idea of penalties is cause for concern and aren't on board with the plan just yet.
The ordinance has been to the city council three times now, and they still haven't made a decision. Some members of the council were worried about wording in the plan on how they would penalize residents who don't follow the conservation efforts.
"They were worried that we were shutting off people's water. And I said, we're not talking about domestic water here, as much as we are talking about irrigation and excessive water use," Clark said. "This is not something that we're going to use willy nilly. It will only be in effect if there is an actual emergency."
Tontitown was the fastest growing city in Northwest Arkansas in 2023 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. To keep up with the rapid growth the city is seeing, they're also trying to build a new water tank. They have a piece of land for it and plans were already approved by the health department.
"When we built our first tower about five years ago, I would say there wasn't enough future planning built into it. So we've got half a million gallons worth of storage and we need to add at least another million because of the growth in our town," Clark said. "Daily average has gone from about 300,000 a day to over 700,000 and then in the hot summertime, now we're seeing daily totals over a million gallons."
He said the new tank is a part of a bond refinance issue that voters will see on the November ballot.
"One of them is for a new police station. One is for the water tower. One is for some street improvements, and then another for the parks and community building," Clark said. "You can't do without water. But with the growth we have got to expand our system and improve our system in order to accommodate more development."
The council took no action on the issue at their Committee of the Whole meeting on Sept. 3. Clark said they'll bring the ordinance back to the council at the next meeting with a few changes.
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