Can the answers to Southern Utah’s water woes be found in Nevada?

Can the answers to Southern Utah’s water woes be found in Nevada?
Illustration by Sydnee Chapman Gonzalez

The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with Utah Stories. 

St. George, Utah, and Las Vegas may be worlds apart culturally, but the two share a number of important characteristics when it comes to water conservation: low rainfall, high temperatures, heavy tourism and rapid population growth. 

Both are also almost wholly dependent on a river for their water needs — for Las Vegas the Colorado River and for St. George the Virgin River. Las Vegas, however, has a two-decade head start on Southern Utah when it comes to many water conservation policies. 

So can Southern Utah learn from those 20 years of experience?  

If there’s one person who’s uniquely qualified to compare the two regions, it’s Doug Bennett. He spent 23 years with the Southern Nevada Water Authority before becoming Washington County Water Conservancy District’s conservation manager in 2023. 

“There’s a surprising amount in common, but obviously very different cultures and timelines,” Bennett said. “Some of the projects that we’re working on now are projects that may have been implemented a decade or more ago in some other cities “

Forced to adapt 

In the early 2000s Las Vegas and surrounding cities were forced to take a hard look at their water conservation policies. Southern Nevada was surpassing its allocation of the Colorado River even as the river was seeing record-low flows

“Those two things were like freight trains on the same track headed right toward each other — and we needed to intervene,” said Bronson Mack, a spokesperson for the Las Vegas Valley Water District and the Southern Nevada Water Authority

The consequences of such a collision were especially concerning for the Las Vegas Valley, which gets about 90% of its water from the Colorado River. Local officials changed course quickly, adopting policies and programs targeting water waste. Twenty years later, it’s paying off. 

In recent years, Southern Utah has come face-to-face with its own water shortage. The Virgin River, which supplies a majority of Washington County’s drinking water, is essentially tapped out, forcing the area to look to more aggressive conservation measures and new water supplies. 

“They’re very, very comparable, and yet the water supply community and the water culture are completely different,” said Zach Frankel, executive director of Utah Rivers Council, a water conservation advocacy group. 

“Las Vegas is decades ahead of St. George, and Utah in general, in conserving water because they ran up against the limits of their water supply much sooner and started working really hard as a community in Las Vegas to teach themselves how to convince and compel residents to reduce water use.” 

Differing intensities 

Many of the policies and programs Southern Nevada already implemented are among measures adopted in Washington County in recent years, including:

  • Prohibiting water waste, such as excessive irrigation and leaks 
  • Requiring new developments to have water efficient landscaping and plumbing fixtures 
  • Putting restrictions on fountains and water features
  • Using water metering systems that can track individual homes’ water usage in real time 
  • Implementing surcharges for excessive water use
  • Rebates for businesses and homeowners who replace their grass with landscaping that uses less water
  • Limiting the time of day when residents can water their landscaping during the summer 
  • Developing uniform conservation standards across the municipalities in the area 

Although these measures reflect some of the strictest water policies in Utah, a few of Washington County’s measures still lag behind Southern Nevada’s in intensity. 

For example, Southern Nevada has a mandatory watering schedule that prohibits residents from running their landscape irrigation systems outside their assigned watering days. Those who ignore the schedule can face a fine. 

Washington County has a watering guide with similar scheduling, such as watering less days a week during the winter. But the enforcement of that guide is up to municipalities and comes with no fines or consequences for those who disregard it. 

Likewise, although both Washington County and Southern Nevada have restrictions on turf grass for new developments, the restrictions in Southern Nevada are more aggressive. 

Washington County is the first in the state to ban nonfunctional grass on all new commercial, industrial, and insertional development.

Southern Nevada’s ban takes things a step further by also including residential developments. The region has prohibited the installation of grass in new residential front yards since 2004 and in 2022 added measures prohibiting grass from being installed in backyards as well. 

Meanwhile, Washington County has turf limits for new residential developments based on their square footage in 2022. 

Southern Nevada also has a few new and old tricks up its sleeves that Washington County has yet to adopt:

A fair comparison?

Despite booming populations, both Washington County and Southern Nevada have managed to decrease their per capita water consumption. 

The Washington County Water Conservancy District reported reducing its per capita water use by 30% since 2000. During that same time, its population increased by over 120%.  

Southern Nevada, meanwhile, reduced its per capita water use by 58% between 2002 and 2023 while its population increased 52%. 

But Scott Taylor, St. George water services director, said comparing Utah per capita water use to that of other places hasn’t been a fair contrast. That’s because, until legislators passed a bill last year, Utah did not include water that is recycled back into the environment through treated wastewater in its calculations. 

“I think in the future it’ll be more comparative, but in the past, it has not been a good comparison,” he said. 

Water utility officials in both regions, in fact, cautioned against such comparisons in general.   

“It’s not apples to apples, but we can certainly learn best practices and take those best practices and then tweak them or modify them to best fit our communities,” Mack said. “Conservation and water use is going to vary city by city, community by community, and it’s not a matter of measuring one city’s conservation against another city’s conservation. You’re never going to get those things to line up.”

Bennett agreed, saying it can be difficult to sell a policy or program to the general public just because it worked in another community. A more effective approach, he added, is explaining a program’s outcomes without trying to paint a picture of a particular city. 

“When you say, ‘Las Vegas did something’ in their mind, people envision what Las Vegas is: It’s 2.3 million people, it’s a very large city, people don’t often know their neighbors,” he said. “They just go, ‘We don’t want to be Las Vegas.’ I don’t want St. George to be Las Vegas, either. It should always have its own unique character. We should always be making our own decisions. And so you have to be cautious about making comparisons or pitching programs by saying, ‘in Las Vegas, they did this.’ People immediately go “Ick. I didn’t choose to live there. I don’t want to live with 2 million people.’”

Frankel, however, thinks the comparison is a fair one. 

“Many Utah water leaders have been on this kick to claim that we are somehow some unique place and that there should not be standards and that it’s not ‘fair’ to compare us to other communities,” he said. “That’s a bogus, nonsensical claim because the practice of water supply and water delivery has been performed for literally hundreds of years, thousands of years, and there are standards of professional accomplishment that we need to hold ourselves to.”

Wins and improvement 

Scott Taylor, who’s worked for St. George’s water department for two decades, speaks proudly of the city’s wins. He said the city is using the same amount of water it used seven years ago despite adding 8,000 new connections. 

“It’s a combination of our citizens taking water conservation more seriously, and I think the biggest effect of that was the new development. They’re just a lot more water-wise in their new development,” he said. “The last five years, there’s a lot more emphasis on water conservation from the general public.”

This year the region launched the parade of gardens — loosely modeled after the popular parade of homes — where residents toured examples of their peers’ waterwise landscaping. Some southern Utah municipalities have also prohibited new golf courses, something Las Vegas has yet to do, although it has placed restrictions on golf courses. 

One area where Bennett hopes to expand conservation efforts is on golf courses. None of the courses, he said, have taken the water district up on an offer to use GPS-technology to map how players use the courses. That mapping would in turn be used to identify parts of the courses that aren’t being used that could be switched out for more water-efficient landscaping.

Although Washington County and its towns and cities have taken a number of steps, there’s still room for improvement, said Frankel. 

Some of his suggested improvements include transferring secondary water systems like canals to municipalities or returning the water to rivers and improving leakage rates. 

“St. George and Washington County have taken the initial steps to make their water governance better, but they still have a long way to go to catch up to Las Vegas,“ Frankel said.

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