FAIRBURY - The city of Fairbury lifted its summertime water restriction guidelines this week after close to two months of conservation efforts - and now, city leadership is focused on making improvements to the city's water system that could make future restrictions completely unnecessary.

Low precipitation and high temperatures earlier this summer forced the city of Fairbury to ask its residents to restrict water usage back on June 19.

And this week mayor Kelly Davis said Fairbury had received the required rain to raise the reserves in the water tower past a critical point, enough to enable the city to remove the restrictions on public water use on August 12.

"The rains we had in July and the first part of August have kind of got the area out the drought status," Davis said following the city council meeting Tuesday. "That was the whole thing for even keeping it on [as long as it was] - I had people calling me for a couple weeks wanting to know why we were still in it, and I said, you don’t have to water every day. You don’t even have to water every other day to keep your grass looking nice. We just didn’t want to get the water levels down to where we were a year or so ago, where the water tower level dropped and sent out all the signals and alarms. So we were just trying to get it to where it could stay where it was, or maybe build up a little bit to where we weren’t playing catch-up."

Even during the period of restriction, Fairbury has pointed its focus at the Crystal Springs park and campground just west of town. The lakes at Crystal Springs need to be continuously pumped and the water redistributed so it doesn't flood into the surrounding camp sites.

"We have to pump water out of the Crystal Springs wells into the lake, it’s like a quarter of a million gallons a day, otherwise, the water level out there is so high, it will flood the campground if we don’t keep pumping it out," Davis outlined. "So it goes into the ponds, the ponds siphon off into the river and away it goes – a quarter million gallons a day."

Davis said the city is pursuing three pilot programs, scientific processes which would help make the water in the lakes and reservoirs here safer and easier to access. Some nitrates, natural compounds found in the water, can prove problematic, so the aim has been to reduce those compounds by adding in other common wastewater treatment elements like biofilm. Initial results from the first two studies have been "impressive," the mayor said, and a third setup is already underway.

"It seems like a catch-22: the biofilm, we think, is reducing the nitrates, but then the biofilm plugs up our filters – and those are thousands of dollars a pop and they’re supposed to last a few years but they were lasting a week," Davis explained. "The biofilm isn’t dangerous for the water, it’s just plugging up our system and costing us a lot of money."

And if they find a tenable solution, there may never be another water restriction in this part of the state again.

"If we get Crystal Springs back online, I don’t think it’ll be a problem whatsoever," he concluded. "We’ve got a two million-gallon reservoir down by the power plant, underground water storage for the city supply, and water from Crystal Springs comes into that. If we get Crystal Springs back online, we won’t have to go into water restrictions for anything no matter what the drought is."