Water is for Fighting Over

by John Fleck

  At that time, the Valley’s water needs were modest enough that the old Las Vegas Land and Water Company was sufficient to get the job done. But by the 1940s, the metro area’s political leaders realized that they needed to build a new piece of institutional plumbing, a government agency responsible to the community as a whole rather than an appendage of the private sector. Once again, the early water-governance structures proved inadequate to meet the water needs of a community making the jump from rural agriculture to modern metropolis.

  The newly formed Las Vegas Valley Water District bought out the railroad’s interests and began laying pipe to connect Las Vegas proper with the old Basic Magnesium system in Henderson. Colorado River water finally began flowing to Las Vegas.

  Learning to Work Together

  When (formerly) sane water managers open the fire hydrants and run water down the streets of a desert city, you have a problem. By the 1980s, southern Nevada had a very big problem. Federal help brought Colorado River water over the hill and into the valley for the growing city, but figuring out how to put it to good use turned out to be harder than anyone expected.

  In 1965, Congress passed legislation authorizing construction of the Southern Nevada Water System, an expansion of the old Basic Magnesium pipeline that would finally give the Las Vegas Valley the infrastructure needed to exploit its 300,000 acre-foot share of Colorado River water allocated under the interstate water deals made in the 1920s. Compared with the amount of water being pumped to Los Angeles, this remained a tiny slice of the Colorado River pie, but it finally seemed like enough water to secure Las Vegas’s foothold in the desert.

  Beyond the 30,000 residents the valley’s water supply had supported in the 1940s, Las Vegas leaders could now see a path to the creation of a major city in the desert. Six pumping plants would move water uphill from Lake Mead through a four-mile tunnel and more than thirty miles of underground pipes. Las Vegas was finally joining the greater Colorado River Basin plumbing system.19

  Nevertheless, over time Las Vegas quickly found that, while it had the physical plumbing it needed, the metropolitan still area lacked the institutional plumbing to properly allocate and manage the now-substantial shared water supply. The formation of the Water District had been a start, but it wasn’t enough. Instead of sharing the water, the communities of the Valley engaged in what historian Christian Harrison called “hoarding and wasting” as each raced to use more water and thereby lock in a larger share of the scarce supply.20

  The problem lay in the rules used to decide who got how much. The state’s Colorado River Commission determined the formula, which was based on each municipality’s previous year’s usage. That created incentives to maximize water use rather than conserve it. What we call “Las Vegas” is really a hodgepodge of smaller municipalities and unincorporated areas, which at the time was served by a hodgepodge of water purveyors. Four cities within the Las Vegas metro area—Las Vegas itself, North Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City—as well as the unincorporated areas of Clark County were all racing to use more water to support more development, which would allow them to grab the largest-possible piece of the expanding tax base.21 In one famous case, Boulder City (the affluent and casino-free enclave closest to Hoover Dam) actually opened fire hydrants and dumped water in the streets in order to ensure a large allocation the following year.22 Nevada was still not using its full 300,000 acre-foot share of Colorado River water, which ought to have been a good thing. But rather than having a rational discussion about the best way to accommodate rising water needs as the region grew into the allocation, individual communities were scrambling for their piece of the pie.

  Harrison ties Las Vegas’s moment of transition to the 1989 opening of the aptly named Mirage, the first of the multi-thousand-room mega-casino-resort giants. It launched a highly profitable building spree, and southern Nevada’s use of Colorado River water began to shoot up, doubling between 1985 and 1993.23

  Beginning in 1990, the Valley’s water providers took the tentative first steps toward collective water management. As we will see later, a shared understanding of resources is necessary for cooperation, and nowhere demonstrates the point better than Las Vegas. The water providers hired a consulting firm, Water Resources Management, to provide a credible, independent answer to the question of how much water Las Vegas had and how much it needed. The answer, in WRMI’s 1991 report, was scary. On its current trajectory, Las Vegas growth would overshoot the Valley’s water supply within five years.24

  While discussions were under way to deal with the problem, the Las Vegas Valley Water Authority (one of the key purveyors, which delivered water in and around the city of Las Vegas itself) took a step unheard of in growth-oriented Las Vegas by issuing what amounted to a unilateral halt to the extension of water service to new developments. The Authority sent a clear message to the development community: if you want to keep building, Las Vegas needs to get its water house in order. It also sent a message to the other Valley water agencies that the days of racing to lock up water-use allocation and development-driven tax revenue were past.25

  By July 1991, the Valley’s seven largest water agencies had come to an agreement on the formation of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. The new agency was an umbrella institution that acted as a middleman between the Bureau of Reclamation and the local water agencies to distribute Colorado River supplies. Rather than fighting over allocations, they agreed to pool their water rights. When there were shortages, the pain would be shared.26

  Make the Desert Blossom Like a Rose

  Policy machinations matter, but it’s ultimately people who will determine Las Vegas’s water future. You can see it in the conservation ethic of landscaper Kurtis Hyde. Hyde calls himself a “gardener,” but that description hardly captures his role, or the importance of people like him, in the West’s evolving relationship with water.

  Hyde, the son of a schoolteacher, grew up in a little northern Nevada town called Lovelock, on the interstate between Reno and Salt Lake City. He was born into the Mormon faith, which is an important piece of his story. Since they arrived in Utah in the late 1840s, Mormons have been central to the task of measuring, marshaling, and using the West’s water in new ways. From childhood, Hyde embraced Brigham Young’s edict, based in the Bible’s book of Isaiah, to “make the desert blossom like a rose.” “I’ve been a gardener since I was a little boy,” Hyde told me as he sat behind a desk at Par 3 Landscaping, a company that sits at the intersection of water and Las Vegas’s future.

  A graduate of Brigham Young University with a degree in botany, Hyde thought he was headed to a career in the Forest Service, but he ended up instead at the forefront of Las Vegas’s water-conservation industry. Water bills in Las Vegas remain modest, but for businesses they can add up, which creates an economic incentive to conserve. Perhaps more important, though, is public awareness of the city’s fragile water supply, which in the past few decades has created an increasing conservation ethic. Because most of Las Vegas’s indoor water use is fully recycled, running out of the valley’s sewage treatment plants and back into Lake Mead where it can be reused (“We’re only borrowing it, and we have to give it back,” one Las Vegas executive explained), most of the region’s conservation efforts have focused on outdoor landscaping. There, water pumped up from Lake Mead evaporates or is transpired from the leaves of plants, leaving pleasant greenery in its wake but contributing to the growing uneasiness in this desert city.

  Hyde thinks it’s fine—even necessary—for the resorts to be lush. They are the core of his adopted city’s economy. It’s out in the spreading suburbs where the water conservation action is.

  Driving west through town, Hyde points at median strips and shopping center borders that used to be lawn. Green grass has its place, Hyde said as he pointed to a little grassy play area in a West Las Vegas neighborhood that his company helps maintain. You want someplace for the kids to throw a Frisbee or kick a ball. But you shouldn’t waste precious water on a
strip of grass that no one can use.

  Par 3 replaces sprinklers that used to spray water into the air, evaporating a significant portion, with drip systems, some that detect moisture need with weather sensors that adjust watering schedules to meet optimum conditions, maximizing every drop of water consumed. So Hyde is still pursuing Brigham Young’s edict. He just realizes that it has to be done with less water.

  And the conservation Hyde is practicing has been central to the Las Vegas strategy. After the formation of the Southern Nevada Water Authority in the early 1990s, there was a real effort to slow growth of the Valley’s water use, but it was not enough. By the early 2000s, Lake Mead was dropping and Las Vegas had finally hit the limit of its Colorado River water allocation.

  Recycling sewage, an option considered by many western cities, wouldn’t help, because Las Vegas had long ago maxed out its use of that tool. Treated sewage has long flowed down Las Vegas Wash and back into Lake Mead, where it can be used again. In coastal cities, putting your sewage effluent to use rather than dumping it in the ocean is an important water-policy tool, but Las Vegas was already using it. That also meant that while indoor plumbing—low-flow shower heads and the like—got some attention, most of the conservation action was outdoors. A gallon saved in the toilet meant a gallon less pumped out of Lake Mead, but also a gallon less returned. There were some advantages because of savings in water treatment costs and energy, but the overall impact of indoor conservation was close to net zero on the overall Las Vegas water supply.

  Outdoors, though, water put on lawns and gardens is lost to the system forever—“consumptive use” in the jargon of the water manager. So the Water Authority paid homes and businesses to tear out lawns—4,000 acres’ worth since the program was launched in the early 2000s. This period was the depth of a frightening drought. In a span of four years, nearby Lake Mead dropped eighty-four feet. Drought was tangible to the residents, and they reacted by tearing out lawns and taking other water-saving steps with a surprising vigor. Per capita water use dropped 20 percent, and then kept going. Las Vegas’s use of Colorado River water dropped 26 percent by 2013, even as its population went up by 34 percent.

  Residents are restricted to outdoor watering just once a week in the winter, and three days per week in the summer, and if you water on the wrong day, you’ll hear from your neighbors.27 In new homes, front yard lawns are prohibited entirely, and backyard lawns are limited to 50 percent of landscaped areas. In nonresidential development, lawns are generally prohibited entirely. When I walked by the famous Mirage, the resort casino that started it all back in 1989, I noticed that the lawn out in front is made of fake grass.

  A Multi-Purpose Agency

  As often happens with the creation of such collective water-management agencies to act on behalf of a region as a whole, the Southern Nevada Water Authority became more than just a water wholesaler. Following a pattern seen many times across the region—with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and, in particular, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District—the SNWA became the umbrella agency for the region’s water management as a whole. Issues that were beyond the scope of any one community—regional conservation, sewage reuse, expansion of the Southern Nevada Lake Mead intake system, protection of the aquifer, acquisition of additional sources of water from other parts of the state, and especially negotiations with the federal government and the other Colorado River Basin states—could be taken up by the SNWA, making them Las Vegas–wide problems and thus expanding the range of policy options available to solve them.

  In addition to water conservation within Las Vegas, the agency was aggressive in pursuing new water supplies. Most controversially, it filed water-rights claims to what it called unused groundwater across vast swaths of rural Nevada. The idea was to pump the groundwater and pipe it to Las Vegas. This triggered a legal struggle, with rural residents and Nevada’s neighbors in Utah fighting what critics view as an old-school urban grab of rural water reminiscent of Los Angeles buying up groundwater from the Owens Valley of rural eastern California in the early twentieth century. They disputed the Las Vegas claim that the water was “unused,” saying the groundwater pumping would dry up natural springs and leave desert in its wake. This was the sort of project that would have been impossible for any of the formerly squabbling Las Vegas metro-area water agencies to pursue on their own.

  The project, while still alive on paper, was largely stalled by the early 2010s, in part by legal challenges, in part because of the enormous costs, and in part because slower population growth and Las Vegas’s remarkable water-conservation success made the rural groundwater unneeded for the time being. By the summer of 2015, Las Vegas was so flush with water that the city loaned some of its unneeded supply to help Los Angeles through a deep drought.28

  Risks Remain

  The great failure in Las Vegas water management is an odd one. Like many cities, it has repeatedly underestimated its customers’ zeal for conservation, which results in overestimating how much water Las Vegas will need.

  These failures are understandable. Water managers’ incentives favor erring on the side of caution. The consequences of having too little water are far greater than the consequences of having too much. So Las Vegas has continued to pursue expensive and politically costly plans to import more water into the Valley from rural Nevada, water that the Valley’s conservation success suggests may never be needed.

  The economic downturn that began in 2007 and knocked the legs out from under the construction boom in the growing cities of the western United States has made Las Vegas water managers’ job far easier. In 2009, the Southern Nevada Water Authority estimated that it would need enough water by 2014 to serve a population of 2.6 million people. But with growth stalled, the actual population in 2014 was just under 2.1 million.29

  While the city’s population grew more slowly than expected, Las Vegas residents’ conservation performance also exceeded water managers’ expectation. The agency’s 2009 resource plan projected water use would drop to 240 gallons per person per day by 2015. But already by 2014, water use was down to 205 gallons per person per day.30

  That is still a lot. Many other cities use less water per person. As we drove past strip malls and apartment complexes on the metro area’s sprawling west side, Kurtis Hyde eagerly pointed out useless lawn borders and other overly wet landscaping that provided opportunities for more savings. The numbers bear this out. Water-use comparisons among cities are maddeningly difficult because of the differing assumptions made as each city calculates its own use. But by a reasonable apples-to-apples comparison, Las Vegas used 212 gallons per person per day in 2013, compared with Albuquerque, New Mexico’s, 136.31 Faced with extraordinary drought during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a quintet of major Australian cities demonstrated that it is possible to go far lower, averaging just 84 gallons per person per day.32 Melbourne, the most extreme example, got all the way down to 65 gallons per person per day, one third as much as Las Vegas.33

  City-to-city comparisons can be misleading. None of the Australian cities have as little natural rainfall as Las Vegas. Less rain means a need for more landscaping water if you want your city to be green. So we should not expect Las Vegas to cut its water use as far as Melbourne. Las Vegas officials also point to the fact that all of its sewage-treatment effluent is returned to Lake Mead for reuse, making its net water use far lower. But examples in places like Albuquerque, where sewage effluent also is reused, nevertheless suggest that, if Las Vegas chooses to continue to grow, it has room to significantly improve its water conservation and keep its water use within current levels. With some of the lowest-priced water in the western United States,34 Las Vegas has not yet used what economists say is one of the most important water conservation tools of all—raising prices.

  A return to the population growth rates of the 1990s and early 2000s could exhaust Las Vegas’s current water-supply cushion. But the fundamental economic shift in the West’s g
rowth economy in the late years of the first decade of the 2000s suggests that this is unlikely. Economists expect a future with a much more modest growth rate for Las Vegas than the unsustainable boom years.35

  Las Vegas leaders have been criticized for an unwillingness to constrain community growth in the face of possible water shortage.36 But with savings from water conservation far exceeding demand from new growth, Las Vegas currently sits on a water supply cushion that keeps growing as the city stores unused water in aquifers for future use.37

  Las Vegas is not alone in overestimating how much water its residents will need. In 2005, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power projected it would need more than 700,000 acre-feet of water a year by 2015. The actual use in 2015 was less than 500,000.38 In 1997, Albuquerque projected that it would need 125,000 acre-feet per year by 2015. By 2014, actual water usage was under 94,000 acre-feet and dropping faster than Albuquerque’s population was growing.39 This is a common pattern among municipal water systems in the western United States.

  The Las Vegas region’s political leadership has begun to recognize that residents are getting ahead of them in their attitudes toward water conservation. In September 2015, the Southern Nevada Water Authority revised its long-term water resources plan by using new assumptions that recognize increased conservation as well as the long-term slowing of the region’s population growth. The new plan shows that, even in a worst-case water-supply scenario under which ongoing drought or climate change permanently depletes the Colorado River’s flows, Las Vegas will have sufficient water supplies using its current portfolio until the 2040s.40 But even as the new plan was being finalized, water users’ conservation efforts continued to race ahead of the agency’s projections, allowing Las Vegas to use less water and bank more for the future, or prepare for a time when climate change reduces the Colorado River’s flow.