Question of the Day - 16 June 2024

Las Vegas is the driest city of the 280 largest cities in the U.S. (and Nevada is the driest state). In an average year, Vegas receives all of 4.5 inches of rain. (Phoenix gets twice that much.) In addition, the temperature ranges are fairly extreme for a desert, upwards of a 110-degree swing, with average lows in the 30s in December and January. As such, the Mojave is a pretty barren place — dry and rocky, very hot in summers and cold at least two months out of the year. 

These contrasts clash on the Las Vegas area’s 70 golf courses -- yes, 70, according to a recent count. A sizable percentage of the tens of millions of annual visitors to Las Vegas come here primarily to play golf on some of the finest courses in the country.

How much water the courses consume is a common question and a big topic, which we can answer here only by scratching the surface.

In the boom years of the ’90s, water was plentiful, desert acreage was cheap, and dozens of golf courses were built. In those days, the only question for developers was how much dynamite they had and how big their bulldozers were.

But then the drought hit and by the early 2000s, a major area-wide conservation effort was put into place; since then, Las Vegas has become one of the most water-smart cities in the country. Today, it’s illegal to have a front lawn in any new home in Las Vegas and the Water Authority had a program for a while in which it paid homeowners who already have lawns to take them out.

They've also paid golf courses to do the same thing. The Water District has paid out tens of millions of dollars to area golf courses to remove upwards of 1,000 acres of turfgrass, nearly 20% of all golf-course property in the area. This has conserved billions of gallons of water.

In addition, up until recently, the Water District drought plan asked that golf courses stick to an annual water budget of 6.3 acre feet of water per acre. Since then, golf courses and their supporting industries have met the challenge. Sometimes stiff fines await them if they don’t. But earlier this year, that allotment was reduced to four acre feet. Courses that use more pay a "significant surcharge" on any water above the limit.

Fact is, however, that of the 70 courses in the region, most are already at or below the limit of four acre feet. The rest are hovering around five. According to the District, only two courses (unnamed) use more than six acre feet annually.

And it’s not just Water District incentives and penalties driving the golf-course conservation efforts; the links also save big on water bills. It’s not uncommon for Vegas golf courses to pay $1 million or more a year just for water. Next to labor, water’s the most expensive item in a course’s budget. In fact, conservation efforts have been so successful that the golf courses now use 6%-7% of the city’s total water consumption — less than the casinos.

So what have the golf courses done specifically?

The water itself is “brown” — effluent water straight from the county wastewater treatment plant, not drinking water from Lake Mead. It’s high-quality re-use, but it still contains salts that course superintendents have to deal with.

Golf-course watering is very high-tech, thanks to centrally controlled irrigation systems with their own on-site weather stations tied to the irrigation computer (so that watering is based on localized evapotranspiration data).  

For example, raising and leveling irrigation heads at even grade with the surface can increase water efficiency by about 20%; upgrading to high-efficiency nozzles saves even more water.

Other measures include: modifying irrigation schedules to avoid runoff; lining lakes with polyvinyl edging them with rock to reduce leakage; using variable-frequency drive pumps that only run to meet demand; performing regular irrigation audits that consider wind, topography, system pressure, head type and spacing, and other factors; converting turf to xeriscaping and heat-tolerant plants; replacing ryegrass with Bermuda; and not overseeding roughs.

In the end, though it can’t be said that nearly six dozen golf courses in the driest locale in the country are shining examples of “sustainability,” they are, in our opinion, doing a good job of walking the fine line between offering golfers an attractive place to play and doing everything they can to conserve as much water as possible.

And as for being more important than people, we can say that they're less important than the casinos. Of the top 10 commercial water users in the Las Vegas Water District, none is a golf course. All 10 are casinos.