During the meeting in which the City Council unanimously approved the ordinance, City Council Member Richard Hildner added an amendment exempting vegetable gardens from the requirement, and Workman noted that the rules would not apply to irrigation at the Whitefish Lake Golf Club, which draws its water from the Whitefish River rather than the city system.

Workman said the new rules “were modeled off of a number of different conservation ordinances throughout the country, mostly in the Southwest. …We definitely used some practices that had proven effective in other communities.”

After years of population growth and rising tourism, Whitefish’s water system is under strain. The city’s treatment plant has a full capacity of 4 million gallons per day, or 3 million gallons per day with one unit out of service. According to the city, late-summer demand breached the 3-million gallon mark in three of the last five years.

It calculates that under current conditions, it could serve an additional 1,075 “existing residential units,” each one equivalent to a typical single-family home's use. But in April, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality informed Whitefish that it would not consider any new extensions that would increase demand until the city submitted a Water System Capacity Evaluation and a deviation request.