When and where

Whew! A month of emergency water restriction violations has come to an end.  My hat is off to the police officers who worked diligently to bring some enforcement teeth to this little crisis, when voluntary restrictions failed to do the job.  Some individual officers in particular shouldered a particularly heavy load, due to their shift and beat assignments. The violations had some strong patterns in both time and space, so if you worked any of the hours between 0400 and 1000 on the night or morning shift in northwest or southeast Lincoln, you were more likely to catch these calls.  Here's a visual on the spatial and temporal distribution:

While the map shows the density of the violation complaints, it is also depicting the relative density of automatic sprinkler systems, and the bar graph of violation times also reflects the preferred watering schedule of their owners, along with the time newspaper is delivered.  I think we can conclude that newer subdivisions at the edge are more likely to have automatic sprinklers, that most people follow the standard advice of watering in the early morning, and that newspaper carriers have cell phones.

Nebraska has a history of multi-year drought cycles, so we could be back in a water emergency again next summer or more often in the next several years. The Mayor has assembled a work group that I will be participating in to see if we can build a better mousetrap.  I'm pretty confident we can, and I intend to try to figure out how we can enforce restrictions more efficiently and without involving the criminal justice system.