HOUSTON  Lance Armstrong is one of the favorite sons of Texas and a model citizen known as much for his social conscience as his cycling. So it came as a surprise when it was revealed this week that he is one of the biggest individual users of water in Austin, where he lives.

Say it ain’t so, Lance.

In July, Mr. Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times, used a whopping 330,000 gallons of water at his lush Spanish-colonial home, with an acre of gardens and a swimming pool, city water authority officials said.

This tremendous flow of H2O, which is 38 times what the average household in the city uses in the summer, comes as Texas is going through a dry spell and officials are asking people to cut back on watering their lawns. “We are definitely short on rain,” Lisa Rhodes, a spokeswoman for the authority, said with a sigh.

Mr. Armstrong declined to be interviewed. He has been in Colorado and California all summer and only noticed the surge in water use when he saw his bills go up, his spokesman, Mark Higgins, said in an e-mail message. (The bill for July was $2,460.) “Lance and all the folks involved are looking into it and will for sure get it under control,” Mr. Higgins wrote.