It’s hard to imagine a Fountain Hills without its titular Fountain running on the hour, but that’s been the case for the past few weeks here in town.

The issue was brought to our attention courtesy of a recent letter, wherein a resident pointed out that on several occasions, they noticed that the Fountain had not been running as scheduled.

It turns out that the high winds as of late have been to blame, as they tend to cause quite a bit of water to spray outside of the confines of Fountain Lake. As pointed out in this week’s issue, any water that goes beyond that boundary is technically in violation of the town’s effluent water permit.

We can’t really fault the town for taking the measure of lowering the wind gauge that controls the Fountain to 5 mph for the time being. If the spray was causing issues and anything above 5 mph is problematic, it makes sense they would take the appropriate actions.

But that brings us back to the fact that this is Fountain Hills and, as of late, there’s been no fountain to speak of.

We’re hopeful that town staff will be able to come up with a compromise; something that allows the town’s landmark to be on display even during somewhat windy days. An adjustment to the height seems like a solid solution for dealing with high gusts and, yes, even then the only answer will be to occasionally shut it off completely.

If nothing else, maybe a system can be put in place to notify potential visitors that the weather is calling for high winds and the Fountain will likely be absent for a while. We can understand residents being frustrated with a missing Fountain on their daily walks, but our bigger concern are those who come to our town from beyond the hills and being disappointed when our world-famous attraction is a no show.