Rochester Hills, MI Landscaping Rules: Water Restrictions (2026)

Section 102-394 was adopted to conserve water and reduce consumption during peak hours. It reaches every customer of the city's water supply system who engages in outdoor watering of lawns, gardens, plants, trees or shrubs, but it carves out water drawn from a private well, pond or other source not tied to the city system, and it exempts watering tied to commercial agriculture, farming, tree and plant nursery operations and golf courses. Within that scope, an automatic or programmable landscape irrigation system may run only between midnight and 5:00 a.m., Michigan time.

Manual irrigation by hand, or brief unprogrammed manual use of an automatic system for testing, repair or winterizing, is allowed at any hour. A water user who finds the restriction creates a hardship can ask the director of the Department of Public Services, or the director's designee, for relief; the request must explain the hardship, and the director weighs the city's contractual water obligations, prevailing weather, water supply conditions and the requester's circumstances before granting, modifying or denying relief, a decision the code makes final.

Enforcement runs through the municipal civil infraction process in Chapter 66: the water customer and the property owner or occupant are both responsible for a violation occurring on the premises, with a warning for a first offense in a calendar year and a civil fine of not more than $500.00 for any repeat offense in the same year.