It’s a cliche, but it’s true. The cheapest gallon of water — like the cheapest gallon of gasoline or the cheapest kilowatt of electricity — is the one you don’t use.
That’s the realization behind the successful efforts of the Washington County Water Conservancy District, where lies the rapidly growing city of St. George, to greatly reduce its per capita consumption of water — water that the parched region doesn’t have.
Utah has a lot of “water conservancy districts,” though most of them seem to be more interested in selling water than in conserving it. But with a population already above 200,000, plus part-time vacation home owners, expected to top 400,000 by 2060, conservation had to become the WCWCD’s byword.
That’s the origin of the district’s “Get Off Your Lazy Grass” initiative, where the district pays property owners to remove thirsty expanses of grass, lawns and the many small strips and patches that provide no benefit for the water they consume.
The payments are only available to property owners in cities that have adopted the district’s water conservation building standards, a successful way of providing bottom-up pressure to get all seven cities in the county to adopt those standards.
Washington County has now replaced 1.5 million square feet of grass. Along with other conservation tricks, including water-efficient building standards and higher prices for big users, the county has cut its per capita water use from 177 to 153 gallons per day.
There’s more to be done, in Washington County and throughout Utah. We’ve always been a desert, and a changing climate can only make us more so.
But the efforts of the Washington County Really Is Conserving Water District point the way.