CENTERVILLE—In a continuing acknowledgment of the prolonged drought in Utah, Centerville City has made some more changes to its landscape ordinance. 

The city council has already added a waterwise element to the ordinance but “we still needed to go back to the fundamentals inside the landscaping ordinance and see if there were some changes we could make that we could be sensitive to the waterwise,” Community Development Director Cory Snyder told them at their Nov. 1 meeting.

The changes primarily impact commercial and industrial development in the city.  It would also cover multifamily developments (The city’s landscaping ordinance does not cover single-family homes where there are no landscaping requirements). In the past the city has required that 75 percent of those developments’ open space be landscaped. This has primarily meant that most developments have met that requirement by putting in turf, usually Kentucky bluegrass, which is not sustainable, Snyder told the city council.

At the city council’s request, the planning commission has been studying the issue. As the staff and the planning commission has hashed this issue out, they have determined that 50 percent landscaping of those areas makes more sense, Snyder said.

The ordinance was also changed to discourage turf and instead encourage drought-tolerant planting or xeriscaping:

“For commercial and industrial developments, the expansive area use of water resource intensive lawn and turf shall be avoided,” the ordinance now says.“We are trying to tell the commercial and industrial that we don’t want you to just pick turf as your only option in your planting scheme,” Snyder said. Decorative gravel and decoratively textured concrete are also now allowed.

Modifications were also made to allow less landscaping in the area west of I-15 which has no secondary water and is forced to utilize culinary water on its projects. The ordinance previously called for 15 percent of a project there to be landscaped; that figure is now 10 percent. Xeriscaping is also encouraged. 

“Xeriscaping is not just plants that take low water, it is a native system,” Snyder said. “With native plantings you irrigate for the first couple of years. After that you can basically cease using irrigation and the idea is the natural rainfall would take care of those plantings,” he said while acknowledging that with the change in weather patterns it is hard to predict just what “natural rainfall” is going to be.

Developers would be encouraged to wherever possible utilize a licensed landscape architect with drought tolerant experience to ensure drought tolerant landscape design would be implemented, since in the past they have usually met the requirement by installing just gravel and some trees, Snyder said.