Montebello, CA Landscaping Rules: Water Restrictions (2026)

Section 8.29.060(A) of the Montebello Municipal Code makes daytime watering a permanent, year-round rule rather than a drought-only measure: irrigating a lawn, landscape or other vegetated area with potable water between ten a.m. and one hour before sunset Pacific Standard Time is prohibited every day, with narrow exceptions for a hand-held bucket, a hand-held hose with a positive self-closing shut-off nozzle, or brief adjustments and repairs to an irrigation system. Watering may not happen more often than every other day, and the schedule runs by street address: odd-numbered addresses water on odd-numbered calendar dates and even-numbered addresses on even-numbered dates, with a special allowance for the 29th of February and the 31st of a thirty-one-day month.

New or reseeded lawns get a one-time exemption from the day limit, and drip irrigation systems are not restricted by it. Subsection B separately caps any station on an automated or unattended irrigation system at fifteen minutes of watering per day, unless the system uses very low-flow drip emitters putting out no more than two gallons per hour, or weather-based controllers and stream rotor sprinklers meeting a seventy percent efficiency standard. These are the chapter's baseline, permanent requirements; the city can layer on tighter day-per-week schedules under Sections 8.29.070 through 8.29.090 once it formally declares a Level 1, 2 or 3 water supply shortage.