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VIOLATORS BEWARE

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com

Published: March 29, 2009

WESLEY CHAPEL - The moon was a dusky orange crescent low in the eastern sky as Larry Cosner drove past the guard house at Saddlebrook Resort shortly after 5 a.m. on a Saturday.

Cosner, a water plant operator with Pasco County's utilities department, rolled down his truck window and listened for the tell-tale hiss of illegal watering.

A few minutes later, Cosner was lit by the headlights of his Ford Ranger pickup as he aimed his point-and-shoot camera at the fountain of water issuing from a large rotating sprinkler head.

A ticket would follow, mailed to the property owner with a fine and court date.

"It's a necessary evil to go out and do this," said Cosner, who works the graveyard shift to avoid confrontation with homeowners.

As drought digs deeper into the Tampa Bay region's water supply, Pasco has joined the list of counties tightening limits on how residents use the water.

Unlike Tampa, which recently banned the use of sprinklers completely, Pasco still lets residents water their lawns once a week, based on their addresses.

Those schedules were loosely enforced in years past, but the county has nearly tripled the number of people looking out for illegal watering.

The county has added 32 utility workers to 19 code-enforcement officers who issue tickets for illegal watering.

Utility workers build late night or early morning watering patrols into their work schedules, but they also get overtime on the weekends, said Bruce Kennedy, the assistant county administrator for utility services.

"We don't have a dedicated team," Kennedy said last week. "We have to marshal our available people."

County officials also will ask Sheriff Bob White to enlist 50 citizen service unit volunteers to enforce watering rules.

Sheriff's office spokesman Kevin Doll said it's unclear how many citizen service folks will be willing to work the graveyard shift patrolling for sprinkling scofflaws.

"How much they're going to be out there actually writing citations, I don't know how much that'll happen," Doll said.

After two years of issuing warnings to first-time offenders, Pasco officials began issuing tickets late last year for anyone caught watering illegally.

Since November, the county has issued more than 1,000 tickets for illegal watering - five times the number issued for the first 10 months of last year.

The tickets don't go to all property owners equally, though.

Watering enforcement officials focus on older subdivisions that use drinking-quality water for sprinkling instead of the treated wastewater supplied through the county's reuse system.

County commissioners on Tuesday raised fines for first-time offenders from $43 to $143 dollars in hopes of encouraging landowners to pay more attention to how they use their sprinklers.

On Tuesday, county officials will report to the Southwest Florida Water Management District governing board what they've been doing to reduce water use. Stepped-up enforcement is at the top of the list.

Back in his truck, Cosner added one more address to the list of county residents getting tickets for watering their grass on the wrong day or time. The resident of Fairway Drive was among more than 100 property owners who got tickets for illegal watering that weekend.

"We really don't want to do this," Cosner said. "But we're backed into a corner right now."

WHEN TO WATER

Pasco County limits property owners to once-a-week lawn watering. The schedule is 6 p.m. to midnight or from midnight to 8 a.m. and is based on the last digit of a property's address:

Monday: 0-1

Tuesday: 2-3

Wednesday: 4-5

Thursday: 6-7

Friday: 8-9

Source: Pasco County

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201.

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