A worked example, and the problem inside it

On May 15, 2026 the Catawba-Wateree Drought Management Advisory Group moved the basin into Stage 2 of the Low Inflow Protocol. Lancaster County Water and Sewer District, as a member of the management group, was required to implement mandatory restrictions with a goal of a 5 to 10% reduction in overall use. Stage 1 had been reached on April 16, 2026.⁴

The operative terms, as published:

Avoid lawn, garden, or other heavy irrigation if possible. If you must water, please use the following schedule: Even number addresses: Tuesday and Saturdays from 2 am until 10 am. Odd or un-numbered addresses: Wednesdays and Sundays from 2am until 10 am.

Non-essential uses to be eliminated include discretionary vehicle washing, decorative water features that do not support aquatic life, discretionary power washing and filling swimming pools. Topping off pools remains acceptable at Stage 2. And the document states that "Mandatory restrictions in Stage 2 do not apply to essential, community and business uses," noting some normally discretionary activities may still be allowed if performed as a licensed business or for community-serving functions.

The two unresolved questions for an association

First, which schedule applies to a common-area meter. An odd/even address rotation presumes a residential address. An irrigation meter serving an entrance feature, a clubhouse lawn or a streetscape may be un-numbered — which the Lancaster text folds into the odd-address group — or may carry an address that bears no relationship to the area it waters. Whether common-area irrigation falls within the "community uses" carve-out is not resolved by the document.

Second, the penalty structure scales badly for shared meters. Utilities at Stage 2 are required to impose penalties. Lancaster does so through surcharge rates: Tier 2 customers using between 10,000 and 20,000 gallons pay 2.5 times the Tier 1 rate, and Tier 3 customers using more than 20,000 gallons pay 3 times the Tier 1 rate.

Those tiers are set at household scale. A single common-area irrigation account serving a community's entrances and amenity areas can pass 20,000 gallons in a billing period without anything unusual happening, which places an association in the top surcharge tier as a matter of arithmetic rather than of conduct.

The covenant conflict nobody has addressed

Many South Carolina declarations require owners to maintain lawns and landscaping to a standard, and authorise the association to fine, or to enter and remediate at the owner's cost, where the standard is not met.

A two-mornings-a-week mandatory schedule can make that standard unreachable. No South Carolina statute resolves the conflict, no agency has issued guidance on it, and no 2025-2026 rule addresses association common areas. The Drought Response Act does not mention covenants, and the Homeowners Association Act does not mention drought.

So the interaction is left to the documents and to general principles. Two are worth noting at category level. South Carolina construes restrictive covenants strictly and resolves doubts in favour of the free use of property. And an enforcement action requires the association to plead the specific covenant it says was breached — a requirement that decided an architectural case against an association this year.

None of that answers whether an owner who could not water has breached. It has not been litigated in South Carolina.

What is knowable

Drought status and restrictions change at each Drought Response Committee meeting, and mandatory terms are set by individual water systems and basin groups rather than statewide. The authoritative source for current status is the Committee's own published status and minutes; for restrictions, it is the water system serving the property.

See water conservation and association authority in South Carolina.