Palmer Lake’s trustees declared a Stage 1 water emergency on Thursday night, effective immediately. Outdoor irrigation is now permitted for one hour a week — Wednesdays between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. — and only from a faucet-filled bucket or watering can of five gallons or less. Sprinklers and automatic irrigation systems are prohibited at all times. The warning period is over; the town has moved to citations.
What the rules are now
How: a faucet-filled bucket or watering can of five gallons or less — nothing else
Prohibited at all times: hose-end sprinklers and automatic irrigation systems
Odd and even addresses: no longer relevant; one schedule applies to everyone
Who it applies to: every user of the town’s water system, inside or outside town limits, whether or not they have a service contract
Enforcement: warnings and citations into municipal court, penalties under Chapter 1.12, and discontinuance of water service
Variances: may be granted by the town administrator or clerk under section 13.24.050(10)
In force until: the board modifies or ends it by resolution
Resolution 30-2026 passed 5-0 on a roll call at the end of a five-hour night. Trustees Atis Jurka, Michael Beeson, Tony Beltran and John Marble voted with Mayor Dennis Stern. Trustee Roger Moseley was not in the room; Trustee Elizabeth Harris was absent.
The measure was recommended by Charles Roubidoux, the Town of Palmer Lake‘s water supervisor and operator in responsible charge, who was called away to the treatment plant during the meeting when storm alarms went off and did not present it himself. His written recommendation and the resolution are in the meeting packet.
Why
Monument Creek, the town’s primary surface water source, has been dry since the middle of June. There is no flow from Glen Park Reservoir. With no raw water coming in, the town’s surface water treatment plant cannot be operated at all, and demand is being met entirely from groundwater.
That burden has fallen on one well. The town’s Arapahoe aquifer well, A2, has produced water every day since the end of June. Roubidoux reported a significant decline in its performance and rising drawdown, approaching the level at which its production rate would have to be cut. The town’s Denver aquifer well, D2, cannot meet current demand on its own. On August 8th the superintendent advised the mayor and staff of all of this, and asked for the emergency declaration.
He also told them he believes there is a leak somewhere in the distribution system, and has engaged a leak detection crew, which spent this week surveying the town.
The town may need to rely exclusively on groundwater until spring 2027. Thursday’s rain, which was heavy enough to send road crews out with front loaders, does not change that: the lower reservoir was briefly spilling, and, as the board was told, it would not last the night.
What a Declaration Changes
Palmer Lake has been under voluntary and then mandatory restrictions for much of the summer, tightening to a single watering day. The declaration matters because it supplies the legal footing for enforcement. Chapter 13.24 of the municipal code ties warnings, citations and the discontinuation of service to violations of restrictions imposed under a declared emergency; without the declaration, the enforcement provisions have nothing to attach to.
Town Clerk Erica Romero told the board that education and warnings had been exhausted — notices on monthly bills, notices on the website, direct contact with residents and, for commercial properties, visits asking for voluntary compliance. The town shut off water at its own parks before asking anything of residents. From here, she said, the town moves to citations.
Glen Smith, the interim town administrator and police chief, put it more directly. Do not, he said, put sprinklers out in the middle of the night: the department works around the clock, officers can see it, and violators can explain it to the municipal judge on the first Monday of the month.
The resolution reserves the board’s authority to move to Stage 2, which imposes broader restrictions on outdoor irrigation and water use, if conditions worsen. It also requires the water superintendent to report to the board at every regular meeting on well production, aquifer drawdown, storage, flow in Monument Creek and the leak-detection survey. The board intends to revisit the restrictions when there is enough creek flow to run the treatment plant again.
The town clerk is directed to post notice at the post office, the town office, town hall and on the town website, and to notify water customers with or before the next billing cycle.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: Monument Town Council, August 3, 2026 — the neighboring town raised water rates for the first time since 2020 and voted to leave the Loop regional water project in the same week Palmer Lake’s creek ran dry.
Primary documents: Resolution No. 30-2026, declaring a water emergency and imposing Stage 1 restrictions · agenda memorandum of Charles Roubidoux, water supervisor and ORC, dated August 13, 2026 · water department monthly report and weekly Palmer Lake water accounting forms — all in the Board of Trustees regular meeting packet of August 13, 2026.
Town code: Palmer Lake Municipal Code Chapter 13.24, water conservation guidelines and emergency restrictions, including sections 13.24.020, 13.24.040, 13.24.050, 13.24.060, 13.24.070, 13.24.080 and 13.24.090.
Methodology
The restrictions above are quoted from the operative text of Resolution 30-2026 as adopted, not from a summary of it. Conditions at the wells and in the creek are as stated in the resolution’s recitals and in the water supervisor’s agenda memorandum, both dated within a week of the meeting. Remarks by town staff come from the town’s live stream of the August 13th meeting, working from a machine-generated transcript of that recording. Transcripts of this kind are imperfect — they misrender names and garble phrases — and the Independent’s reporting process uses AI tools that can make mistakes; if we have gotten something wrong, we will correct it, via the Independent’s corrections page. The recording carries no speaker labels, so the speakers named here were verified against the recording itself rather than taken from the transcript.
The town has not published a figure for current well production or for how much demand the restrictions are expected to remove, and none is estimated here.
