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Duncan enacts water conservation policy

Duncan_It's official. The City of Duncan now has its first water conservation plan.

City manager Jim Frieda says city water officials spent the last five months working on the eight-page ordinance.

The city council voted to the plan in place at their last council meeting last week, after studying the city's water usage, and shrinking rainfall amounts over the past few months.

Like most city water plans, there are four stages. Each one describes the guidelines that must be followed with outside watering and each one is more severe in consequences if someone is found breaking those guidelines.

Frieda says on Monday, Duncan will be under Stage One--voluntary conservation of outside water usage.

Duncan relies on four lakes for its water supply, and for the first time in memory, the combined capacity of those lakes has dropped to 75 percent.

Frieda says city officials modeled their ordinance on water conservation plans from surrounding cities, such as Lawton and Wichita Falls.  He says they are considering making some adjustments to it to accommodate the drilling industry.

"We have had several producers, several drilling companies request the use of water for their drilling operations and so one of the things we are looking at now is modifying the ordinance to consider how much water we can sale to each driller for their activity at a given point and time."

The city would go to Stage Two, which is restricting outside water usage to every other day, if the combined lake levels drop to 60 percent.