Reducing water use was front and center at the Aurora City Council meeting Monday night as the city’s elected leaders passed a pair of ordinances designed to conserve water amid a severe drought in Colorado.
The council unanimously gave initial approval to a measure that would ban the use of evaporative cooling systems in the city, with one of the main targets being water-intensive data centers.
Data centers have become notorious for their heavy water use — with the liquid used as a cooling agent for the servers and computers that run 24 hours a day. Evaporative cooling systems circulate evaporated water through the air and can use a lot of it, especially across large spaces.
The measure is the first of a number of rules Aurora expects to enact on data centers this year, with plans in the next few months to dictate where in the city they can locate and how far they must be from homes and schools.
The council on Monday also unanimously passed an ordinance that would tighten up turf rules in the city. It would prohibit residents or businesses who are seeking to install cool-weather grass, like Kentucky bluegrass, from doing so unless they get written permission from the city manager first.
Residents could still plant what is known as warm-season turf, like Tahoma 31, which uses 60% to 70% less water than Kentucky bluegrass, Aurora Water’s General Manager Marshall Brown said at Monday’s meeting.
The measure also would ban the installation of ornamental water features without city manager approval. Additionally, it would prohibit spray irrigation in non-high-traffic areas in the city between Oct. 1 and April 30. The same ban in high-traffic areas already applies between Oct. 15 and the end of April.
“What we saw this last winter was a lot of irrigation systems turning on as early as February,” Brown said Monday.
The ordinance bounces off one from four years ago, when city leaders prohibited any cool-weather turf and ornamental water features from being installed as part of new development.
Both that and the data center measure will need to pass final approval votes at the next council meeting in two weeks to become law.
