A little while back, I was over at my parents’ place having dinner, and my mom asked me – as the Mirror’s City Hall reporter these days – a question she thought I could answer.
As it turned out, I totally couldn’t.
“Who do I call if I have a bylaw problem at 2:00 in the morning?” she asked.
I told her I thought she’d just have to wait until the office was open and talk to someone then. I assumed the city didn’t have anyone available to take bylaw calls at 2 a.m.
That wouldn’t work, she said.
Why not? What was the problem?
Well, her issue was that her neighbours had their sprinklers set to come on in the early morning hours – sometime in the neighbourhood of 1:30 a.m. – and they were loud enough to wake her up. She’d been sleeping with the windows open, as many of us do in the summers – especially those of us without air conditioners.
But if she called in the morning, the neighbour in question would obviously not be contravening the watering bylaw by the time an officer came to check it out, and it would be a “my word against theirs” kind of situation she’d rather not have to deal with.
So I went ahead and asked the city. What should someone do in a situation like this?
I was told that in this particular scenario, people should call the waterwise phone number or email water.wise@campbellriver.ca with the problems or issues. You would also need to supply your phone number and name. They don’t disclose who made the complaint, but they also don’t follow up on anonymous tips.
But even that doesn’t really answer the question. What are the chances that an email saying “my neighbour had their sprinklers on last night when they weren’t supposed to” would net any kind of response from the city? I mean, I suppose a city official of some kind could go talk to the neighbour and tell them they need to abide by the restrictions, but they can’t really issue a ticket on someone else’s word that there was an offence committed. Nor would we want them to be able to.
Likewise, we probably also don’t want to pay for the staffing increase that would be required for the city to be able to respond to issues after-hours for things like people watering when they shouldn’t.
I mean, obviously we should pay for people to be available to respond to things like road flooding or water main breaks, trees that have fallen across the road after being blown down in a storm or logs washed up on the Island Highway. But for watering restriction violations?
Maybe I’m wrong, though. Maybe we should have someone whose job it is to answer the phone after hours, go out and verify the complaints, issue tickets and educate people on their responsibilities when it comes to water restrictions. I mean, it’s kind of a big deal if our fire department doesn’t have the water they need to fight fires, right?
It sure would be nice if we didn’t have to enforce these things, though.
In an ideal world, people would just follow the rules required to make our community the best it can be.
Too bad we don’t live in an ideal world.