Stan Spraul, general manager of Southern Highlands Golf Club in the foothills of Las Vegas, Nev., saw the drought coming.
"We knew 20 years ago that this was going to happen," he said.
Annual precipitation in the Upper Colorado River Basin alone has been well below normal for the past four years.
Lake Mead, a reservoir that Southern Nevada draws from for much of its water use, is at its lowest level in 34 years. Together with Lake Powell, the two lakes have dropped 70 feet since January 2000. These sources provide 90 percent of the water that is used by local residents, businesses, and tourists.
The region, while faced with dwindling water resources, is experiencing continued rates of new residential home development. The competition for water has inevitably led to struggles between homeowners, golf course operators, and state and local authorities, among others.
"The golf industry is an easy target for attack because of the misconception that golf courses waste water," Spraul said.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority was formed in 1991 as a way for its seven member agencies to address Southern Nevada's unique water needs on a regional basis. SNWA has established three levels it can assign to the region for any given 12-month period: Drought Watch, Drought Alert, and Drought Emergency. The current state, Drought Alert, was entered into in January of this year. With each level comes a variety of water use restrictions that become activated when the agency determines that a new stage has been reached.
Spraul, a board member of the Nevada Golf Course Owners Association--a group formed within the last few years to address this specific issue--has spearheaded the effort to make sure that the SNWA's water use restrictions have a realistic connection to the needs of the Southern Nevada golf course community.
"Water is our number one cost, and it is our lifeblood," he explained.
In a series of negotiations that took place in 2003, the golf community helped amend the SNWA's original Drought Plan, a detailed series of rules that would kick into effect should the region move into higher levels of alert. At the time the Drought Plan was written, the area was in the Drought Watch phase, and there was a huge concern that the original version of the plan would mandate an unreasonable reduction in water that would cripple Nevada's golf industry.
Doug Bennett, conservation manager at SNWA, said, "Our most punishing blow was dealt in 2002. That year, the Colorado River only produced 25 percent of its normal flow."
In 2000 and 2001, Bennett explained, SNWA began its outreach to the golf industry to begin formulating ideas on how to better manage the available resources.
"We gathered data on how courses use water. Turf grass, for example, requires four times the amount of water than some alternative forms of landscaping."
Water Usage
As in other parts of the country where water had atone time or another become scarce, there was a legitimate concern that the golf industry would be unfairly targeted as a wasteful or unnecessary consumer of water. At the same time, there was some feeling around the golf community--and even among other citizens' groups--that the local government was not paying enough attention to the unabated growth of new residential development. In the initial recommendations for approval of the Drought Plan in 2003, Henderson, NV Councilwoman Amanda Cyphers disavowed the problems were related to new development.
"Sixty percent of the total water supply goes to homes," Spraul said, "And 70 percent of that water goes toward outdoor landscaping."
Bennett said, "There's not any one group that we're targeting when it comes to reducing overall water use. The truth is, we're trying to find win-win situations for everyone involved."
There was, however, a distinct effort to get the heaviest users of water to tow the line.
"We presented a chart at one our meetings that listed the golf courses with the heaviest use in descending order," Bennett said. In the list, Bennett noted, SNWA used only the initials of the respective clubs "so that the superintendents would understand the point of the list without just focusing on where their club was ranked."
When the original Drought Plan was approved by the SNWA's board in January 2003, it was technically done in violation of the state's open meeting law.
"They voted to adopt the plan without any comments from those in attendance," Spraul said.
The issue was so divisive that SNWA was contacted by the Nevada Attorney General's office and notified that they had neglected Public Open Forum Laws. As a result, SNWA rescinded the vote.
At the heart of the conflict were the guidelines specified under the Drought Alert classification. The amount of acre-feet per acre (AF/A) of water each course was using to per year was the crux of the disagreement. According to Spraul, golf courses had been successfully operating at a rate of seven AF/A, but the 35-page Drought Plan had suggested that courses reduce to 5.4 AF/A should the area move into Drought Alert, which ended up happening in January of this year. An acre foot is the equivalent of 326,000 gallons of water, which is what it takes to meet the needs of an average family of five for one year.
In the months that followed the SNWA's original contentious decision, it was clear that there needed to be a more thorough discussion of the exact water needs of the Nevada golf industry. In order to help SNWA better understand this position, the NvGCOA hired the Restropo Consulting Group to study the true economic impact of harsh water restrictions. The study presented the following facts:
* The golf industry is a major contributor to the local economy--over $ 300 million in local wages, salaries, and operational expenses. For a more detailed breakdown of these numbers, refer to Chart 2;
* Property values of homes built on golf courses would go down--thus reducing the tax base;
* SNWA had previously recognized the golf industry as among the best water managers, but was now subjecting them to harsher standards than other members of the community;
* Three out of every 10 visitors to Southern Nevada come for golf --accounting for 30 percent of incoming tourism. The spill-over effect on airfares, hotels, restaurants, and gaming would be disastrous. Furthermore, spending by golfer-tourists and related parties to Las Vegas totals $ 1.1 billion annually.
* The industry produces 4,481 jobs;
* Personal income from those jobs is $ 114.6 million annually;
* Sales generated $ 87 million in annual tax revenue.
Reaching a Compromise
"We didn't want to run anyone out of business," Doug Bennett said. "Our goal was to get people to do practical things to reduce water use."
Following a series of meetings with SNWA, the golf course owners were finally able to get the agency to agree to the use of individual water budgets, instead of across-the-board restrictions that didn't take each course's unique needs into account.
"The water budget would mainly target only the top 10 percent of the industry's use," Spraul said.
Consultations with the Southern Nevada Golf Course Superintendents also helped dictate--from an agronomic standpoint--what direct course remedies could be made to reduce overall water use. Some of those recommendations included:
* Turf removal/conversion of turf to native vegetation. From SNWA's perspective, the removal of so-called 'ornamental turf'--that which is not used on the golf course--should be converted to desert landscaping such as sand, rocks, and desert bush;
* Change in overseed procedures;
* Replant rye grass with more tolerant Bermuda grass.
Thanks to the efforts of the NvGCOA and the superintendents, the technical figures provided by the golf industry helped SNWA reach a compromise on the matter. For the Drought Alert stage, water budgets were raised up to 6.5 AF/A, though with severe financial penalties for overuse.
Bennett said, "It's hot that your water gets turned off if you go over the 6.5 number--it's just that it gets very expensive if you do." For the golf industry, the new number symbolized a standard that the courses, for the most part, could live with. According to a study by Dr. Dale Devitt, a consultant to the Las Vegas Valley Water District, golf courses "can survive (at 6.5 AF/A), but only for a limited time, probably less than two years."
In the meantime, the people of Southern Nevada will continue to hope that the rain will come. But with a looming state of Drought Emergency on the horizon for 2005, there will likely be more challenges ahead.
"The people in the golf industry have done some incredible things out here," Bennett said. "These are people who've figured out how to keep an excellent product under the most extreme of circumstances."
Source: Club Management (Finan Publishing)
