Less than three months after turning off its public fountains in response to the historic drought now gripping most of California, the city of Palm Springs has decided to reverse course and turn many of those fountains back on again, a move that has surprised many in the Southern California community.

A few fountains already had been turned back on by Sunday after the Palm Springs city council voted unanimously last week to allow it, after the local water utility changed a it had put in place in April, the .

"It sends the wrong message. We're in a ," Desert Water Agency board member Richard Oberhaus, who voted against reversing the no-fountains rule, told the newspaper. "You can't ask tourists not to wash or launder their sheets at a hotel, and have gushing fountains at the hotel."

Technically, Palm Springs straddles an area that's been classified between severe (D2) and extreme (D3) drought, according to the on drought conditions nationwide. Those classifications are second only to exceptional drought (D4), a category nearly half the state falls into.

The drought has extended beyond California into much of the Southwest, especially in Nevada where to their lowest level in history last month.

Given circumstances like these, why did the city council act so quickly to restart its public fountains? Largely because the public -- and tourists -- missed seeing them, several councilmembers said.

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"The fountain at the airport is kind of our entryway," Councilmember Ginny Foat . "I'd rather see us take out more grass, and take out more of the water-gobbling trees, than to turn the fountains off; that really don't lose a lot of water."

The Desert Water Agency decided to permit fountains that recirculate water to be turned back on; fountains that don't recirculate remain under the previously adopted restrictions, which also prohibit the use of running water to wash cars and prevent restaurants from serving water to customers unless they request it.

It's debatable how much water is lost to evaporation even from recirculating fountains, members of the water agency told the Desert Sun, adding that the move sends the wrong message to a public that's being asked to make sometimes drastic changes to its behavior in response to the drought.

"It's not a tremendous savings of water, but it's a very important symbol that we're in a drought, that we need to think about water, how we use it new ways," , the chair of the water agency's board of directors, said. "And fountains in the desert are, in my opinion, not part of that new way of how we should be using water."

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Aerial view overlooking landscaping on April 4, 2015, in Ramona, Calif. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)