Lawton, OK Water Use Rules: Recycled Water Rules (2026)

Under City Code Section 6-1-5-189, any commercial car wash facility that obtains a building permit for new construction, or for a remodel costing more than fifty percent of the facility's existing value, on or after January 14, 2015, must install, use and maintain a water recycling system capturing and reusing at least fifty percent of the water previously used in the wash and/or rinse cycles. The recycling system cannot be tied directly into the city's public water lines; it must be isolated from the potable water system by a positive backflow prevention device of a type the city engineer approves, protecting the municipal supply from cross-contamination.

The requirement attaches at the building-permit stage, so a car wash owner triggers it the moment plans call for new construction or a remodel that crosses the fifty-percent-of-value threshold; a facility that simply keeps operating without remodeling is not retroactively forced to retrofit. The ordinance carves out one narrow exception: temporary car wash events put on by a local nonprofit organization are exempt from the recycling mandate entirely, since those are one-off fundraisers rather than permanent commercial operations. Because the rule is folded into Article 6-1 (Building Code Regulations), compliance is checked as part of the building permit and inspection process rather than through a separate water-utility permit, and the backflow device specifically has to satisfy the city engineer, not just the plumbing inspector, before the system passes.