Wednesday March 29, 2023
Eos —
Nevada lawmakers are considering a bold step to ensure that Las Vegas’s basic water needs will continue to be met in the near future. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), which manages the city’s water, is seeking authority, through a sweeping omnibus bill, to cap a single family’s residential water use in southern Nevada to about 160,000 gallons (600,000 liters) annually.
“If approved, this provision would really only affect our community’s largest water users,” said SNWA spokesperson Bronson Mack—“that top 20% of residential water users who use more than 35% of all water delivered to the residential sector.”
This latest development is just one of the ways the authority has sought to protect its community’s access to water. And it’s been so successful in its mission that in the past 20 years, southern Nevada has reduced water consumption from Lake Mead by about 30%, even as the area’s population increased by more than 750,000. When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared a shortage of water in the Colorado River in 2021, the region and the city handled the 25,000-acre-foot (1.2-million-liter) reduction of their water supply in 2022 with relative ease.