Friday, April 16, 2004 | 10:53 a.m.
With no end in sight for Southern Nevada's drought, record numbers of area homeowners are participating in a program where they get money for replacing their lawns with water-saving alternatives.
The Water Smart Landscapes program run by the Southern Nevada Water Authority is now the most heavily used of its kind in the nation, the water authority's conservation manager Doug Bennett said Thursday.
The program has existed since 1999, but it has suddenly become so popular that it has created an unintended consequence -- waiting periods approaching two months just to get yards inspected before homeowners are deemed eligible to receive cash rebates.
At Thursday's water authority board meeting, it was announced that additional contract employees will be hired and a second work shift will be added just to handle the increased demand.
Six additional employees, added to the 19 already involved in the program, are expected to become available by the end of the month. Up to now, inspections have been available six days a week, with employees working from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. But a second shift, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., is being added.
"We want to expand the hours we are meeting with the customers for their convenience," Bennett said. "It also allows employees to share resources, including vehicles."
During a Power Point presentation, Bennett reported that a program-record 3.4 million square feet of sod was removed in March, and that the equivalent of 348 football fields worth of turf has been removed since January 2003. The program also had 9,700 participants in the 12-month period that ended in March, including 2,900 new residential applicants last month alone.
The program, in which homeowners are paid $1 for every square foot of lawn they remove, has grown to the point where the authority estimates it is saving 1 billion gallons of water each year. That's enough water to run 4,444 households a year based on use of 225,000 gallons a year per family.
"To me, that's the best report I've heard since I've been on the authority," Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, an authority board member, said.
Henderson City Councilwoman Amanda Cyphers, chairwoman of the authority board, said her neighbors signed up for the program after she successfully participated to have her lawn removed.
"It's a very easy program," Cyphers said. "My neighbors have seen how easy it was for me to correct my yard."
The program is so popular that the water authority, which initially budgeted nearly $13 million for Water Smart this fiscal year from revenue raised through water connection fees, added $8 million in February to make it through the fiscal year.
Bennett said a combination of "spring fever" -- homeowners wishing to tackle landscaping issues -- and publicity have made the program increasingly popular.
He also conceded after the meeting that increased demand for rebates has also made it more difficult for homeowners to find landscapers willing to do the lawn removal.
"It's a situation where the landscapers can be picky about their customers or raise their prices," Bennett said.
A lengthy list of landscapers have signed up to participate in the program. But Pete Luna, president of the Southern Nevada chapter of the Nevada Landscape Association, said he believes homeowners can get landscapers to their homes within three days if they go through the telephone directory.
Luna said it is a misconception that a landscaper has to be listed on the water authority's website in order to participate in the program. Any qualified landscaper who can remove a yard could be hired, he said. But Luna said it helps to choose one from the website list at www.snwa.com because those landscapers are familiar with the Water Smart program.
"There are so many landscapers here I don't think it would take more than three days to get one," Luna said. "The quality of work may be the issue."
The board heard separately from Kay Brothers, the authority's deputy general manager for engineering and operations, that the prolonged drought is not going away anytime soon. Snow pack was 66 percent of average for the Colorado River Basin as of April 8 and precipitation this year has been 84 percent of average, Brothers said.
And March temperatures averaged 78.4 degrees Fahrenheit this year, nearly nine degrees higher than normal.
"March was not very good for the drought," Brothers told the board. "This is as bad as any drought we've seen."
Another discouraging statistic: water elevation at Lake Mead, where Southern Nevadans draw their drinking supply, fell to 1,138 feet this month, 76 feet lower than four years ago.
If there is a bright side, Brothers said it is that the authority's water use from the Colorado River was lower this March than in March 2002 despite the continued population growth in Southern Nevada.
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