Southern Nevada Water Authority wants to ban landscape watering on Sundays
The Southern Nevada Water Authority wants to make Sunday a permanent day of rest for your sprinklers.
The valley’s wholesale water agency is recommending a change in the landscape watering schedule that would limit irrigation to six days a week instead of seven during the summer.
Officials estimate the move would save as much as 900 million gallons of water during the hottest part of the year. That’s enough water to supply more than 5,500 average valley homes for one year.
Doug Bennett, authority conservation manager, said the change should be an easy one to make for most people since research shows that less than half of customers water their yards seven days a week during the summer anyway.
He added that lawns and other landscaping seem to do just fine if watered six days a week from May 1 to Aug. 31, when irrigation is allowed everyday.
“We see this as an opportunity to take our conservation effort up a notch,” Bennett said.
Banning irrigation on Sundays is also likely to cost local water agencies about $1.3 million a year in lost revenue from water sales.
Water authority board members are slated to vote on the proposal at their next meeting at 9 a.m. Thursday at the agency’s headquarters in the Molasky Building in downtown Las Vegas.
The board also will be asked to consider uniform rules governing fountains and other water features. Bennett said those rules differ among the county and the cities that make up the water authority, so staff is recommending the same rules for everyone to “tie up loose ends.”
The changes to the authority’s conservation program come amid recent federal forecasts that project record lows and a possible first-ever shortage declaration in 2018 for Lake Mead, the community’s primary water source.
If approved, the new water rules will have to be ratified by each of the authority’s member agencies. Bennett said that will take time, so he doesn’t expect the restrictions to kick in until next year. The ban on Sunday sprinkler will be strictly voluntary this summer, he said.
Water authority spokesman Bronson Mack added that the agency’s “water cops” won’t be out looking for Sunday scofflaws until the new rules have been adopted by Clark County, Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas.
“We’ll introduce some enforcement next year,” Mack said. “We want to give the community some time to adapt and adjust.”
Landscape watering on Sundays is already prohibited in spring and fall, when irrigation is limited to three assigned days per week, and in winter, when it is restricted to a single assigned day per week.
This is marks the first significant change to the watering schedule since it was imposed 13 years ago, but Bennett does not expect the change to hurt the quality of life or the condition of anyone’s landscaping.
“We think it’s something the community can handle,” he said.
Residents already have embraced conservation measures introduced in 2003 as a temporary response to drought on the Colorado River, which supplies about 90 percent of the community’s water by way of Lake Mead.
Those rules were made permanent as part of a broader conservation program that authority officials say has cut Southern Nevada’s water consumption by 30 percent since 2002, even though the population grew by about 500,000 people.
The community has banned front lawns at new homes, limited grass in backyards and at commercial properties, clamped down on fountains, misters and car washes, and plowed more than $200 million into a turf-rebate program that has paid people to rip out 178 million square feet of thirsty turf and replace it with desert landscaping.
Last year, the authority upped the rebate from $1.50 to $2 per square foot in hopes of spurring more water-saving landscape conversions at homes and businesses. So far, the plan seems to be working. Bennett said applications for the cash-for-grass program are up 80 percent over last year at this time.
Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.
