by John Fleck
This and the examples provided above show that while agriculture currently uses the bulk of the Colorado River Basin’s water, it is possible to scale that back in a way that conserves water to respond to shortfalls while preserving the integrity of the communities that grew up around our old ways of allocating and using the river’s flow.
But with no one in charge of the whole system, and therefore able to impose solutions, they have to be implemented painstakingly, one farm district and municipal water agency at a time. That is the project ahead of us.
CHAPTER 3
Fountains in the Desert
“YOU ALMOST HAVE TO HAVE grown up in the Old West to understand,” explained a Las Vegas water manager to a visiting East Coast journalist in the early 1990s. “There is an emotional, almost irrational attachment people have to water out here. Their whole existence is tied to water.”1
So it is that the driest big city in the United States cultivates an image of being the wettest. When R. E. Griffith built the splashy new Last Frontier hotel and casino in Las Vegas in the early 1940s, he put the swimming pool in front.2 He wanted it to be the first thing motorists saw as they streamed into town on US 91, finishing the hot drive from Los Angeles to what was then an artificial oasis in its infancy.
Down the road from where the Last Frontier once stood, on a warm desert evening seventy-five years later, I joined a crowd along South Las Vegas Boulevard to watch the famed fountain in front of the Bellagio Hotel. I could see why Griffith’s insight has endured. Like the Last Frontier, the Bellagio features its fountains in front, with a wide quasi-European boulevard sidewalk to add to the dramatic effect. All evening long, crowds gathered, mesmerized by the fountains’ musical extravaganzas. The glittering gambling palaces of the Las Vegas Strip are full of similar displays—vast tiled swimming pools at Caesar’s Palace, the Polynesian wonderland of the Mirage, the pirate ships of Treasure Island, the fake canals of the Venetian. But there is no greater icon of Las Vegas and its uncomfortable relationship with water than the fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel.
The fountains at the Bellagio Hotel, Las Vegas (© John Fleck).
Nor is there an icon more misunderstood.
In a desert that averages four inches of rain per year, the fountains’ pond will never be mistaken for Lago di Como, the northern Italian lake on which the luxury hotel’s namesake sits. The original Bellagio enjoys a balmy Mediterranean climate, averaging forty-two inches of rain per year. In hot, dry Las Vegas, weather has never been the chief draw.
But the Bellagio’s fountain, often mocked as a symbol of water excess in the arid Southwest, may in fact represent some of the highest-value water around. The 12 million gallons a year needed to keep it topped up starts as water too salty to drink, drawn from an old well that once irrigated the Dunes Hotel golf course. Twelve million gallons sounds like a lot, but it’s really just enough to irrigate eight acres of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley.3 Total revenue at the seven giant casino–resort hotels contiguous to the fountain, at the corner of Flamingo Road and South Las Vegas Boulevard—the heart of the famed Las Vegas Strip—is an estimated $3.6 billion.4 Include all of the hotel/casino operations in the greater Las Vegas metro area, and the total rises to $21 billion.5 That compares with total agricultural revenue of $1.9 billion in all of Imperial County.6 Imperial County’s farmers get ten times the water Las Vegas gets. Las Vegas makes ten times the money Imperial County farming does. Given the crowds lining the sidewalks for each one of the fountain’s dancing-water shows, the fountains must represent one of the most economically productive uses of water you’ll find in the West.
This is the paradox of Las Vegas—that the city with the least water to work with, that has long been closest to the edge of the water-supply cliff, is the most ostentatious in the display of water. This has made Las Vegas an attractive target, because it is the focus of an almost pathological loathing on the part of some who view it as the great emblem of the West’s sin against nature, and who view water scarcity as the tool by which that sin will be punished. Urban critic Mike Davis exemplified the form when he called Las Vegas “diabolical” and suggested what he called “the Glitterdome” was headed for an “eschatological crackup.”7 Las Vegas may have turned into the sort of urban agglomeration that critics like Davis find sinful, but a close look at the math behind its water policies, supply, and usage suggests that Las Vegas water managers have done a credible job of staving off their sin’s punishment. Far from a path to destruction, they have developed the needed tools, and they have the track record demonstrating the use of those tools, to allow Las Vegas to follow the path the community’s leaders have chosen.
To understand how to solve the Colorado River Basin’s water problems, we have to come to grips with the illusion and the reality of Las Vegas water.
Fountains in the Desert
In terms of water, Las Vegas is handicapped on three counts. First, measured by rain falling from the sky, it is the Colorado River Basin’s driest city. Second, an accident of history left it with the smallest allocation of Colorado River water to supplement that which nature fails to provide. Third, its reputation for hedonism blinds us to a reasonable assessment of what it actually is and does.
Combine its stark aridity with an economic model based on the illusion of lushness and a seemingly insatiable desire for growth, and you have what looks like a recipe for disaster. But Las Vegas will fool you. “We do fake well,” one of the professional foolers, a landscaper who specializes in the town’s art of deceptive lushness, told me as we cruised its boulevards looking at medians and apartment complex gardens.
That veneer of water—the fountains, palms, and ponds of the imitation tropical/Mediterranean/Caribbean Strip—is an illusion, promising much but doing it with very little water. In fact, a successful water conservation effort and its underlying governance structures have made Las Vegas a model of progressive water management. To a greater extent than any other city in the West, Las Vegas decided in a very public way what it wanted to be, how much water this would take, then laid out a plan to make this happen. Las Vegas’s leaders chose growth, and the Southern Nevada Water Authority has made it possible.
Despite the rhetoric of imminent doom, the math is inescapable. From 2002 to 2013, the greater Las Vegas metro area grew by 34 percent to a population of more than 2 million people. During that same period, its use of Colorado River water—its primary source of supply—dropped by 26 percent. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, Las Vegas had become a leading example of a phenomenon that has changed water management across the United States—the decoupling of water use and growth. As population, agricultural productivity, and economic activity in general keep rising across the United States, water use does not.8 By the mid-2010s, Las Vegas was booming, yet the metro area was not taking its full supply from the beleaguered Colorado River.
It did this in part through an aggressive conservation effort, which reduced per capita water consumption by 40 percent. That impressive number doesn’t change the fact that Vegas remains a profligate user of water compared to other western cities. But it does suggest an opportunity. Changing deeply embedded community behaviors and attitudes toward water takes time, and Las Vegas got a late start. The fact that it still has a long way to go means that, if Las Vegas wants to keep growing and is willing to make more changes, there remains room for its population to grow within its current supplies.
This was not preordained. In the 1980s, the municipal water agencies scattered across the Las Vegas Valley were involved in a classic “tragedy of the commons.” The state had not used its full allocation of Colorado River water. Each utility was racing to use more before Nevada hit its limit as the metropolitan area grew.
Las Vegas leaders were up front about the challenges they faced. If they wanted to grow into a super-city, they needed to figure out how to do it within the constraints of a limited water supply. Neighbors would have to stop competing and figure out how to share.
The first step was to band together to create, in 1991, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, a unified super-agency to oversee the distribution of their sparse allocation of Colorado River water.
The second step was an aggressive but voluntary conservation program. The Water Authority paid homeowners to tear out old lawns, and it placed tight controls on landscaping in new construction. In doing so, Las Vegas was making peace with its own environmental psychology. In the stark desert, neighborhood greenery provides a sense of comfort and safety as the city stares at the bared teeth of a hostile world. Las Vegas did not abandon that motivation. It simply decided to pursue it with less water. Casino fountains were not forbidden. Instead, they were required to switch to brackish groundwater rather than spraying precious Colorado River water into the hot night air. The Valley’s political leaders pushed the conservation message hard with a public relations campaign that changed attitudes. And Las Vegas capitalized on its proximity to Lake Mead, treating sewage and returning the effluent to the reservoir so that it could be fully reused.
These measures worked. Las Vegas water consumption began a significant decline, even as its population continued to rise.
While there is much to be learned from the specific steps that Las Vegas took, one of the biggest lessons lies beyond things like lawn removal programs and effluent reuse. Those sorts of specifics will vary from region to region. But the underlying principle applies across the board—it takes governance and changing community attitudes to make things happen.
The Springs
Even while they flout nature with imported water, every city in the arid southwestern United States is anchored to its first water. Los Angeles grew around the Los Angeles River, where farmers could first spread its water across the arid coastal plain to water their crops. In Denver, it was the South Platte. Albuquerque grew up on a valley floor where the Rio Grande emerged from narrow canyons to the north into land with a combination of water and a climate warm enough to grow food. You can trace local history by starting with a community’s first supply of water.
But while Las Vegas’s most famous water is the nearby Colorado River, the river’s water was at the bottom of a deep canyon, inhospitable and largely inaccessible. To find Las Vegas’s first water, you instead have to drive four miles north of the fountained casinos of the Las Vegas strip to a community park flanked by a suburban neighborhood and a shopping mall. There, an old cienega (spring) now called Las Vegas Springs Preserve marks one of the many places in the Great American Desert where water seeped to the surface on its own. Groundwater, accumulated over millennia in the sands and gravels of an aquifer beneath the valley floor, found a path to the surface at the cienega. Such aquifers are a common and important feature of the valleys where the West’s cities emerged, and oases like this served as geographic organizing principles for the first wave of humans to make a living on the hot, dry landscape. If you wanted water in the desert valley, you had to come here.
For at least a thousand years before European immigrants arrived and began changing the landscape, Las Vegas Paiutes used the cienega, with its reliable supply of water, as a winter home. Historians think it likely that early Spanish travelers found their way through the valley in the 1700s, but the first sketchy written record does not show up until Rafael Rivera, a scout in the employ of New Mexican trader Antonio Armijo, wandered up Las Vegas Wash out of what is now Lake Mead and into the valley that would become Las Vegas.9
Water drew trading parties, hopping from one desert spring to the next, but beyond those temporary visitors and a brief and quickly aborted Mormon settlement, the Paiutes largely had the place to themselves until 1861. That year, the Comstock mining boom brought the first wave of European immigrant settlement that pushed the Indians out once and for all.
The railroad arrived in the early 1900s, remaking Las Vegas just as it did every place it reached in its march across North America. Seizing the opportunity, one of Las Vegas’s earliest real estate entrepreneurs, J. T. McWilliams, bought up land on the west side of the tracks and began selling lots. McWilliams seems to be first in a long line of Las Vegas Valley boosters who saw an opportunity in the burgeoning population of Southern California and ran ads in Los Angeles newspapers to lure Angelenos with a “plentiful supply of the purest water.” One had to sink a well but twelve to twenty feet, McWilliams told his potential customers.10
The Union Pacific’s land development subsidiary, the Las Vegas Land and Water Company, delivered most of the water to the early town through a network of cheap, leaky redwood pipes, but the leaders of the growing community needed more control over the supply. Thus Las Vegas’s first experiment in water governance emerged: the Vegas Artesian Water Syndicate. It repeated a pattern seen frequently across the West—the need for collective action to overcome aridity.
The syndicate’s planners misunderstood why they needed water. Like most who moved to the arid western half of the continent during this time, they thought the future lay in farming. “We have many thousands of acres rich enough for farming, and level enough for irrigation,” they wrote in their 1905 prospectus inviting investors. “We believe that artesian water may be had in abundance.”11
Farms still dot the narrow river valleys of the Muddy and the Virgin Rivers an hour’s drive east of Las Vegas, but agriculture never took off in the Las Vegas Valley in the same way that it did in other parts of the growing West. Still, while the early developers’ agricultural projections were wrong, they were right about the need for, and value of, water in the desert. The artesian wells that the syndicate promised were critical to the early development of the valley.
Hoover Dam
That is largely where Las Vegas stood until the 1920s—a small rail stop and desert outpost with little to grow an economy and therefore no need for water beyond that which the valley’s limited aquifer could provide. The accident of Las Vegas’s geography, just miles away from the deep canyons of the Colorado River, was about to change that. The untouchable water was within reach, but the Las Vegas of the 1920s could not begin to grasp its implications.
“Action of 7 States Means Millions to Las Vegas,” the Las Vegas Age proclaimed on November 25, 1922, as it formally announced completion of the Colorado River Compact. The millions would come from building a dam that, thanks to “the Hand of Destiny,” would surely be built at the ideal dam sites in the canyons southeast of town. The Age also trumpeted the importance of cheap power, which would help Las Vegas compete with big industrializing cities back East. If any thought was being given to the water supply a new dam might provide, the newspapers of the day did not mention it.12
Watching Las Vegas’s twenty-first-century water struggles, it is hard to imagine a time when there was plenty. But throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, the springs and the aquifer that fed it provided an ample supply.13 Until after World War II, there was little connection between Las Vegas and the Colorado River. When Arizona, California, and Nevada negotiated the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act, it was jobs from dam construction, not water from the river, that Nevada wanted. With almost no agriculture, little industrial base, and no inkling of the resort mecca that would blossom in the decades to come, Nevada settled for 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water, 4 percent of the total available to the three states and just one-fifteenth of powerful California’s share.14 “Nevada consistently took the position, accepted by the other States throughout the debates, that her conceivable needs would not exceed 300,000 acre-feet,” wrote Justice Hugo Black years later in a US Supreme Court Colorado River water-allocation decision.15
Las Vegas benefited from bursts in federal spending in the 1930s as the nearby Hoover Dam was being built, during World War II, and in the early Cold War years that followed. A safe distance from the coast and the imagined risk of Japanese bombers, Las Vegas was home to Basic Magnesium, a war factory that provided material needed for air-plane bodies. The plant put down roots for what would become the working-class suburb of Hen
derson. Basic Magnesium also provided the initial plumbing to bring Colorado River water to the valley.
By the 1940s, as World War II brought a second wave of spending for a military base and war factory, and a wave of new tourism flowed from Los Angeles, Las Vegas ran up against the same limits that had hit other western cities before it: Las Vegas had burned through its groundwater in a hurry, and the aquifer on which it had depended was no longer sufficient to meet its needs.16
Historian Eugene Moehring describes a 1944 meeting at which members of the Las Vegas chamber of commerce, gathered at the El Rancho Vegas, sat “in stunned silence” as state engineer Alfred Merritt Smith warned that groundwater pumping was putting such a strain on the aquifer that he might block some new well drilling, a move Moerhing said “would have crippled Las Vegas’s postwar growth.” The only solution, Smith said, was to pipe water up from Lake Mead to serve the rapidly growing metro area’s needs.17 Previously, Las Vegas had stood apart from the great network of Colorado River water users that already stretched from Denver to Los Angeles. That changed on the day Smith warned Valley residents that they were running out of water.
The first leg of a pipeline to bring Colorado River water from Lake Mead, over the hill and into the valley, had already been built in the 1940s for Basic Magnesium. Canny civic leaders, already heeding inklings that Las Vegas might need Colorado River water, had persuaded the plant’s builders in 1941 to build a water line larger than was needed for the factory itself.18 But the scale was nevertheless limited, and Smith’s warning suggested that a much larger system would be needed.
