In Sin City, lawn police now has a new meaning
Law meant to save water removing ‘nonfunctional’ grass from city
ILAS VEGAS, Nev. t was a perfectly decent patch of lawn, several hundred square feet of grass in a condominium community on this city’s western edge. But Jaime Gonzalez, a worker with a local landscaping firm, had a job to do.
Wrangling a heavy gas-powered sod cutter, Gonzalez sliced the turf away from the soil underneath, like peeling a potato. Two co-workers followed, gathering the strips for disposal.
Gonzalez took little pleasure in destroying this patch of fescue. “But it’s better to replace it with something else,” he said. The ground would soon be covered with gravel dotted with plants like desert spoon and red yucca.
Under a state law passed last year that is the first of its kind in the nation, patches of grass like this, found along streets and at housing developments and commercial sites in and around Las Vegas, must be removed in favor of more desert-friendly landscaping.
The offense? They are “nonfunctional,” serving only an aesthetic purpose. Seldom, if ever, walked on and kept alive by sprinklers, they are wasting a resource, water, that has become increasingly precious.
Outlawing grass is perhaps the most dramatic effort yet to conserve water in the Southwest, where decades of growth and 20 years of drought made worse by a warming climate have led to dwindling supplies from the Colorado River, which serves Nevada and six other states, Native American tribes and Mexico.
For Southern Nevada, home to nearly
2.5 million people and visited by upward of 40 million tourists a year, the problem is particularly acute. The region depends on Lake Mead, the nearby reservoir behind Hoover Dam on the Colorado, for 90 percent of its drinking water. The lake has been shrinking since 2000, and is now so low the original water intake was exposed last week. The regional water utility, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, has been so concerned that it spent $1.5 billion over a decade building a much deeper intake and a new pumping station, recently put into operation, so it can take water even as the level continues to drop.
The new law, which passed with bipartisan support, is meant to help ensure what water there is goes further. It’s an example of the kind of strict measures that other regions may increasingly be forced to take to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.
It also illustrates the choices, some hard, some mundane, that have to be made to carry those measures out. Here, an advisory committee of community members, with help from the authority, decided what was functional turf (including athletic fields, cemeteries and some parcels in housing developments based on size) and what would have to go (most everything else). The law set a deadline of 2027 for the work to be completed.
Kurtis Hyde, maintenance manager at the company where Gonzalez works, Par 3 Landscape and Maintenance, said at some homeowners association meetings he has attended residents have been quite vocal about the prospect of losing turf. “People get emotional about grass,” he said.
The ban follows years of extensive efforts to cut water use, including a voluntary “cash for grass” program, begun in 1999, for individual homeowners to lose their lawns, limits on watering, and the establishment of a team of water waste investigators. But with no end in sight for the drought, and with the region’s continued growth, measures like these haven’t been enough, said John J. Entsminger, the authority’s general manager.