Commercial landscape maintenance in Arvada.

Arvada runs its own municipal water utility, which makes it one of the simpler cities on the Front Range to plan for — one provider, one rulebook, and the rulebook is published clearly.

It's also one of the strictest right now.

The rules, as they actually read

Arvada declared a Stage 1 drought with mandatory restrictions effective April 15, 2026, targeting a 20% reduction, and said the restrictions may run a full calendar year rather than a summer season.

For a commercial property, this is what matters:

• Commercial, multifamily, and HOA accounts water Tuesday and Friday only. Two days.
• No outdoor watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. — this applies to everyone, every day.
• Trees, shrubs, and gardens can be watered any day with a hand-held hose or drip, still outside the 10-to-6 window. That exception is worth understanding, because it means your drip-irrigated beds are not stuck on the two-day schedule the way your turf zones are. That's an argument for converting bed spray to drip that has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with keeping plants alive on a restricted schedule.
• Violations escalate: warning, $100, $250, $500.

Confirm current status with the City of Arvada before you program anything — drought stages get declared and lifted, and this page reflects the rules as published in July 2026.

What a two-day week does to a commercial site

Two irrigation days, with an eight-hour daylight blackout in the middle of each, is an operating constraint, not a suggestion. On a property with a lot of zones, the whole cycle has to sequence and finish inside the legal hours.

That forces three things to be right:

Uniformity. Fewer events means each one has to land where it's supposed to. A zone with mismatched nozzles or misting from high pressure is wasting a larger share of a smaller allowance. An audit stops being optional.

Cycle and soak. Arvada sits on the same heavy Front Range clay as everyone else. The instinct on a restricted schedule is to run zones longer to compensate — which on clay just means more of it sheets off into the parking lot. Splitting the run into cycles with soak intervals is how you actually get water into the root zone.

Leaks. A stuck valve on a two-day schedule is running on days you aren't even permitted to irrigate. Run the meter test: controller off, no interior water, watch the meter. If it moves, you have a leak.

See Irrigation Management.

The drip conversion argument in Arvada

This is the specific Arvada play. Because the city's rules allow drip irrigation of trees, shrubs, and gardens on any day (outside the 10-to-6 window), converting bed spray heads to drip does two things at once: it eliminates the evaporation and overspray losses you get from throwing water into the air over mulch, and it takes your plant material off the two-day turf clock entirely.

Your shrubs and trees are the expensive plant material on the property. Getting them off a rationed schedule is worth doing on its own terms.

Rebates: be careful what you're told

Arvada partners with Resource Central on lawn-replacement and irrigation programs, but those programs read as residential, and Slow the Flow is explicitly not available to HOAs. We could not verify a commercial turf or irrigation rebate from the City of Arvada.

If a vendor tells you there's Arvada commercial rebate money waiting for you, ask them for the link. We'd rather tell you the money isn't there than help you budget around money that doesn't exist.

The turf conversion still pencils

No rebate doesn't mean no payback. The savings on a turf conversion come from the water you stop buying and the mowing you stop paying for, and those are real with or without an incentive check — particularly under a mandatory restriction, where the turf you do keep is being watered on a schedule that may not be enough to keep it green anyway.

Colorado's SB24-005 already prohibits installing new nonfunctional turf on commercial and industrial property and in medians, parking lots, and rights-of-way. Convert the ground nobody walks on, keep the turf people use.

See What Xeriscaping Costs a Commercial Property and Enhancements.

Snow is Frontier Snow Care.