LAS VEGAS – How worried is this city getting about water? Tom Warden answers the question by driving the streets of a sprawling community on its western edge.
He passes a gleaming row of homes abiding by a strict new rule: no lawns.
He points to sculpted fountains, built to give the place a touch of class: turned off indefinitely.
He stops by a traffic circle carpeted with about 100,000 square feet of lush green grass: to be replaced with rocks and desert plants.
“This problem is coming at us like a freight train,” said Warden, a vice president for the developer of this community of 34,000 homes, called Summerlin. “No one here has ever seen it this dry.”
In the throes of a prolonged drought, and growing at runaway speed across barren desert, Las Vegas is having a hard time reconciling its big dreams with an unforgiving new fact of life: It is running out of water.
The rest of the West, which has been afflicted by the drought for about five years, is watching its predicament with anxiety.
Some scientists say the drought may be the worst to strike the region in centuries. If it persists for several more years, the seven Western states whose shared lifeline for water is the Colorado River could see their supplies threatened, too. The Colorado’s water level is at its lowest point in at least 100 years. Lake Mead, the reservoir that collects some of the river’s flow and holds nearly all of the city’s supply, has dropped about 75 feet in the past few years and is now only half-full. If its water level declines 2 more feet, which is almost certain to occur by year’s end, Las Vegas likely will declare its first drought emergency.
It already feels as though one exists. The Southern Nevada Water Authority will spend $32 million over the next year offering rebates for residents who give up their grass: $1 per square foot, double the price it set two years ago. On average, a football field of turf is being ripped up every day.
That isn’t enough. In cities around the Las Vegas Valley, authorities are raising water rates on homeowners and businesses, restricting the use of lawn sprinklers, cracking down on car washes and threatening water-guzzling golf courses with fines. They are launching elaborate advertising campaigns describing the drought in dire terms and urging residents to conserve.
Some communities are even contemplating covering parks and playgrounds with artificial turf, provoking intense debate. Some parents fear their children will get burns from fake grass during the scorching summer days; others dread cleaning up after dogs.
“We’ve left the era of abundance and entered the era of shortages,” said Patricia Mulroy, the authority’s general manager. “It’s an ugly, ugly period.”
Managing water in the arid West has never been easy, but there’s always been enough of it to go around. In fact, California, the only colossus in the region, long has taken more than its share from the Colorado River because no other neighboring state needed it. And when Lake Mead was filled decades ago, officials figured it would quench southern Nevada’s thirst for centuries.
Then the population boom began. Today, Nevada and Arizona are the nation’s fastest-growing states, with Colorado and Utah close behind.
The pace of development around Las Vegas is dizzying. In the first six months of this year, officials approved permits for the construction of 20,300 new homes – a 67 percent increase from the same period last year. The population has doubled in the past decade, to 1.6 million. It grew by 60,000 people last year.
“We can’t build housing fast enough,” said Monica Caruso, spokeswoman for the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association.
Las Vegas is always one of the driest places in the country. But researchers examining geological patterns here over hundreds of years say the past four decades may have been wetter than usual. Since the 1960s, the region has occasionally averaged about 7 inches of rain a year. The tally during the past few years – about 4 inches – is closer to its historical average.
So the drought may not be an anomaly. It may be normal.
If so, growth has been guided in part by mistaken climate assumptions. An extended drought could profoundly affect how development proceeds.
“People are not facing reality,” said Robert Ferraro, mayor of nearby Boulder City. “We have to change our priorities. But I think it’s going to be a hard sell. I don’t see anything happening fast enough to thwart the problems we’re going to have if we’re headed into a major drought cycle. Every step being taken to conserve water is being overtaken by the number of people who keep coming.”
But the mood here may be changing. A July poll by the Las Vegas Review-Journal found 75 percent of residents favored limits on home construction until the drought ends. Some community leaders are urging the federal government to stop auctioning to builders the large tracts of land that it owns around the valley.
So far, those requests have been ignored. Growth is as much an addiction in Las Vegas as gambling. “How do you just raise the drawbridge to a community that is attracting thousands of new people every month?” Caruso asked.
“To say you can just cut it all off is naive,” Mulroy said. “The issue is not whether we grow, but how we grow.”
For now, she is preaching the urgent need for water conservation. And for the first time, it appears the message is taking hold.
Last year, after doubling their offer for turf, water officials had to add $8 million to the rebate program to accommodate the number of residents volunteering to give up their lawns. Every square foot removed saves about 80 gallons of water annually.
Developers are responding, too. Some are building homes on smaller lots, which lessens the need for landscaping – the main drain on the local water supply. Others have restricted the size of swimming pools or have stopped planting grass along sidewalks and medians.
The consequences of Las Vegas declaring a drought emergency aren’t yet clear, but they’re bound to be severe.
Water rates may be raised again, and more restrictions may be imposed on lawns and golf courses. “We’re the first urban community in the West that has to come to grips with these questions,” Mulroy said.
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