Case Study: Liberty Lake Parks and Recreation Less Water. Healthier Parks.

A smart place to start

Early in 2026, with a dry year shaping up and water restrictions a real possibility, the City of Liberty Lake's Parks and Recreation Director, Jennifer Camp, asked a question more parks directors should be asking before they are forced to. How do we use less water without giving up on the quality or the quantity of the green spaces our community cares about?

She decided to call Irrigation Managers. We are a team of agronomists and irrigation experts, and we help the people running large landscapes dial in their systems to apply the right amount of water at the right time, reducing water use while taking the complexity out of commercial irrigation control systems.

Rather than hand us every site at once, the City started where it made the most sense for them, with a water-use evaluation on a couple of its busiest parks. It was a low-overhead way to watch the approach work and the numbers add up before going further. It worked, and the relationship has grown from there.

There is water to recover in almost every park

Without a target, irrigation becomes reactive. The people making the watering decisions respond to what they can see. In the Northwest, spring is easy, but as summer comes on, the dry spots show up, and the priority shifts to making those spots green again. Run times climb in one area while others fall behind, and the whole season turns into a game of whack-a-mole. The deeper trouble is that a dry spot is a lagging signal. It shows how much water reached the plants a week or two ago, not what they need today. So the crew plays catch-up, pouring more water onto ground that may already be wet but the plants look dry, while the areas that look fine today may be falling behind.

It gets harder after dark. Most watering happens at night, when no one is there to catch a tilted head or a worn nozzle, and those problems look a lot like a zone that simply needs more water. This is where matching water to plant demand does double duty. With a target in place, the real maintenance problems stand out. Every area has a number it is supposed to hit, and the ones that fall short point right to themselves. Setting repair priorities stops being guesswork.

How it is done: Analyze, Implement, Manage

Irrigation Managers works from a simple framework we call AIM. It rests on an old principle: you cannot manage what you cannot measure. So before anything changes, we establish two numbers, where a park's water use stands today and where it should be.

Analyze: set your target.

The right amount of water for any property is a calculation, not a guess. It has three parts. Irrigated area, the actual square footage under water. Plant demand, drawn from decades of local weather data and our agronomic algorithms. And reality, the extra water needed to cover the real-world inefficiencies, from uneven coverage to losses from wind, timing, and pressure swings. The result is an annual budget, broken into a monthly target, in gallons. If you are measuring water use in minutes, you are already missing the point.

This works on any system, in any shape. You do not need a perfect system to start watering to demand. You start watering to demand to find out where the system needs attention.

Implement: program for how the park is used.

The first question is not about water; it is about how the site is used. You do not water a ball field during a game, or parts of the lawn during a movie night. So zones are grouped by how often they need water and when each area is actually free to run. From there, each zone is set to meet peak demand in the hottest part of the season, then dialed down to match plant demand as it falls. Every site is different. Some have soil-moisture sensors or other tools the system can use to fine-tune application. Setting those up well takes some know-how, but they earn their keep when dialed in.

When a site has the tools needed to monitor and manage flow, we load the expected flow rate for each zone and set the parameters and thresholds. That guards against pipe breaks, and it also helps stretch a tight watering window.

Manage: hand the crew the wheel.

A target only helps if someone manages to it, so the crew is trained to use the monthly target as their guide and to make the small, real-world calls the season demands. Back off after a good rain. Nudge run times up before a dry stretch or as the seasonal demand increases. After a hot spell, run one extra cycle to bring the soil moisture back up, then hold it there. What they learn to avoid is cranking everything up with no number in mind. Having a target is the whole game. Without one, even a strong crew is just guessing.

The result: less water, healthier landscape

The City is on track to use 25 to 30 percent less water on these two parks this season, and we are watching it happen now, with turf and landscape that look healthier, not thinner. The reduction holds because none of it comes out of what the plants use. It comes out of the water that was never available to the plants in the first place. And the math runs one direction. The value of the water no longer being applied runs well past the cost of the work, and it returns every season after this one. As the deeper roots that come with proper watering take hold, next year can do better still: the same turf on less water, or better turf on the same. The City also has something it did not have before, a defensible, documented water-use target it can put in front of anyone who asks about water use in the parks.

When the system simply will not run

Reducing water is the headline, but a parks team also needs someone who knows the machine. At one of the City's parks, years of changes, missing documentation, and a few bad connectors had left the field wiring in such a state that the controller could no longer talk to parts of its own system. We traced the faults, worked with the field team on the repairs, and got everything communicating and running the way it was designed to. A schedule only reduces water on a system that works, and keeping the whole system working is part of the job.

Expert support without adding headcount

Most parks teams are stretched thin. Keeping Irrigation Managers on a retainer puts an irrigation expert on call for the department. Need a programming change, troubleshooting help, or just advice on a stubborn zone? Call. Need someone to run zones while the crew is across town, or to keep the sites managed while a key person is out? We step in and handle it remotely.

For a fraction of the cost of carrying that expertise on staff, the department keeps running its day to day with an expert standing behind it. The crew stays in control of their own system. We are simply there the moment they want us.

It works the same everywhere

None of this is regional, and none of it is complicated. Every landscape, in every climate, comes down to one relationship: the water you put down versus the water the plants can actually take up. Run a zone for twenty minutes and the only questions that matter are how much water that applied, how fast, and whether the soil could absorb it before it ran off. Answer that, zone by zone, and you get healthy plants on the least water possible. That is just as true in a wet year as a dry one, on a sprawling regional park or a small neighborhood lawn.

“With a dry year ahead, we did not want to wait until restrictions forced our hand. We wanted to understand exactly how much water our parks truly need, and to manage to that, without giving up the fields and lawns our community counts on. Irrigation Managers gave us the expertise to do it.”

**Jennifer Camp, Parks and Recreation Director, City of Liberty Lake **

Start with the number

Every department is different, but the start is the same: a water-use analysis that says exactly how much water a park needs and how much of it is recoverable. If you are responsible for a large irrigation site, that is the conversation worth having. Irrigation Managers. IrrMgmt.com. 1.800.473.7673.