As we enter the heart of the summer, voluntary restrictions or outright bans on certain types of water usage once again proliferate around the country. Last August, I wrote about a community in Massachusetts that threatened to issue warnings for the first violation of the ban on irrigating your lawn and then on subsequent infractions would turn off the home’s water. However, it was unclear that the town was monitoring residents’ water usage consistently so some readers asked if they should just keep watering until they received a warning.
“No,” was my response. Simply violating an ordinance because you are likely to get away with it is wrong. But I also believed it behooved the town to be consistent in how it enforced its regulations, particularly if it was concerned about a severe water shortage.
Now, a reader from Northern California we’re calling Betty writes that they “are on strict rules of the city to conserve water,” including limitations on how much they can irrigate their lawns. “Well, one of our neighbors is just ignoring this dictate and there is water covering the sidewalk and going down the storm drains almost every morning.”
Betty wants to report the scofflaw to the city, but she doesn’t want to leave her name. “I don’t want to cause trouble,” she writes. “I just want all of us who do conserve water to get a fair shake from those who don’t.”
She wants to know if she should ask the city to allow anonymous tips.
Betty has decided to report neighbors who violate her town’s water regulations and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. If her intention is to help conserve water by alerting the town to those who flagrantly ignore imposed restrictions that certainly seems an ethical choice to make.
Ideally, we would all be willing to put our name on any complaint we had about neighbors violating regulations. In his book Integrity, Stephen L. Carter writes about the three steps that are essential to integrity: discernment, acting on what you discern, and stating openly what you have done and why you have done it. Anonymity falls short of the integrity mark, according to Carter and I generally agree with him.
But if Betty or others believe that reporting neighbors’ behavior might result in personal harm or retribution, a case could be made for allowing residents to file anonymous reports. There’s a phone app in Boston that allows residents to do just that by reporting issues (illegal parking, missed rubbish pickup, violations of one sort or another) anonymously.
If her city doesn’t already provide for anonymous tips that might improve living conditions for all of its residents, then it’s perfectly reasonable for Betty to ask the city do so. Whoever is monitoring such tips should follow through and make sure that the tip is verified and resolved.
But the right thing for Betty’s city or any municipality to do when imposing such restrictions remains making clear to residents how it plans to enforce such regulations. Imposing restrictions without following up or following up inconsistently risks creating cynical residents who wonder why they should obey the law when they perceive others who are not face no consequences.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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