Leaving the chambers of a Southern Nevada Water Authority board meeting, Laura McSwain was ready to turn anger into action.
In the short drive to her home in the McNeil Estates neighborhood west of the Strip, the homeowners association president, already had the makings of a movement: ideas for a logo, organization name and text for an ad in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“They are giving me talking points that I recognize from their website. Finally, I’m like, ‘This is going nowhere,’” McSwain recalled in a recent interview. “I called the people who do some marketing for our business, and I said, ‘Darcy, I need a full page ad, and I need it, like, right now.’”
The ad was simple but spoke to a creeping dissatisfaction among some Las Vegas residents: “Is your water bill too high?”
Today, almost two years later, McSwain has become the de facto leader of a counter-movement, even registering as a lobbyist in the 2025 Nevada legislative session. Retired from running a utility construction company that she and her husband, Ed, founded, she’s well aware of the valley’s population boom. And UNLV projects that Clark County will add 698,000 residents by 2040.
McSwain and her “Water Fairness Coalition” represent a growing faction of Las Vegas Valley residents who find the regional water authority’s water management policies extreme and unfair.
Since the water authority launched its rebate program to reimburse homeowners for removing grass in 1999, it has cumulatively saved 203 billion gallons of water by removing 241 million square feet of grass across the valley. That’s enough grass to cover the acreage of Harry Reid International Airport twice.
Nearly every drop of water used indoors in the valley is now collected, treated and sent back to Lake Mead via the Las Vegas Wash — allowing for millions of gallons of “return-flow credits” that permit Nevada to draw more water than its yearly allocation of the Colorado River.
As water managers do what they can to stretch the river, McSwain sees overreach and unintended consequences, such as rapidly rising temperatures and the deaths of historic trees not properly cared for after turf conversion.
Excessive use or necessary use?
McSwain’s beef with Southern Nevada’s water managers can be traced to a single source: the Las Vegas Valley Water District’s decision to charge customers excessive use fees.
Aimed at fining the top 10 percent of water users, the fees were designed to be punitive, said Bronson Mack, a water authority spokesman. The fees, which were implemented in 2023, only apply to Las Vegas Valley Water District customers — not those served by water districts in Henderson or North Las Vegas.
Every year, when journalists request water usage records, headlines call out the same list of homeowners, from the sultan of Brunei to casino executives. Mack said none of them seem bothered by Las Vegas’ tough ecological position.
“They’re arguing that every other water district customer should subsidize their excessive use,” Mack said. “I’m a little lost on exactly how that position aligns with water fairness.”
In St. George, Utah, a similar fee structure has been implemented. But it has a grandfather clause: Homes connected to the system before 2023 must pay $1 per 1,000 gallons for excess use, while those that connected after that date pay $10 per 1,000 gallons.
However, in Las Vegas, all customers are charged $9 per 1,000 gallons used over a limit that varies by month.
The fees target those unresponsive, wasteful customers the water district serves, Mack said, with $32 million collected from the fees in the first year now earmarked for further water conservation efforts, such as leak repair assistance and more money for grass conversion rebates.
The Water Fairness Coalition calls for a full refund of the money collected from the fees, totaling $47 million through June 2024, according to its website.
McSwain, whose home resides on more than a half-acre, is no stranger to the fees.
Data obtained from the water authority shows that her home usage was 396,000 gallons during the past year — more than double the median usage for customers on similarly sized lots. The home next to hers, which has a pool but doesn’t have grass, used approximately half as much water last year.
She attributed her higher water use to the roughly 35 mature trees on her property.
“I’ve made a huge investment,” McSwain said. “They’re going to get the water they need to thrive.”
An ally in high places
Excessive use fees aren’t only the target of McSwain’s disfavor.
The coalition has caught the attention of one Pat Mulroy — the first-ever general manager of the water authority who oversaw the agency until 2014. Begrudgingly known by some as “the water witch” during her tenure, Mulroy knows a thing or two about forcing Las Vegas to make hard decisions about water consumption.
Mulroy herself said she’s been hit with excessive use charges, a reason her bill rose to nearly $1,100 per month at her highest points of use. And that’s after she voluntarily took a rebate to remove all grass from her property.
“When they first put this in, I went postal,” Mulroy said. “I took out my entire front yard, spent a bucket of money for landscaping. I don’t have a blade of grass on my property anywhere, but I paid the highest water bills I’ve ever paid when I converted to desert landscaping.”
She said the water authority attributed the increased bills to the water she was using to establish her new trees and plants.
In Mulroy’s view, the water authority should not be looking in people’s backyards for water savings. She insists that the fundamental challenges of the Colorado River won’t be solved without finding more water to add to the dwindling system.
Mulroy pointed to Israel, a country where at least 60 percent of drinking water comes from desalination, or the process of purifying sea water. Mulroy oversaw the failed effort to build a pipeline that would have pumped groundwater in from eastern Nevada — something the agency abandoned after she left her post.
“You cannot conserve yourself out of this crisis,” Mulroy said. “The West was built on moving water and developing water. None of these cities would exist if it wasn’t for that principle.”
2027 turf conversion deadline looms
Then comes in Assembly Bill 356 — a first-of-its-kind law in 2023 that gave the water authority discretion to remove “nonfunctional turf,” or grass that the agency determined was not necessary.
Initially, the ban was meant to remove turf that was of no service to the community, such as grass that covered medians and sidewalks. Water authority staff members, facing pushback from some HOAs, have worked their way around the valley, determining what needs to be ripped out by the start of 2027.
The law makes its illegal for water districts to serve customers who water nonfunctional turf, but questions remain about implementation.
“What we know right now is that those who are irrigating nonfunctional grass after Jan. 1 are breaking the law, so there will very likely be some element of a penalty for that,” said Mack, the water authority spokesman. “I don’t have clarity on what that looks like at this point.”
For some homeowners in Stacy Standley’s community, the price of mandating turf removal is steep.
Standley, who serves on the HOA board of Spanish Trail in western Las Vegas and is a three-term mayor of Aspen, Colorado, said the law puts an undue burden on some of his neighborhood’s subdivisions.
Estimates to remove the necessary grass for some townhomes reach $10,000 per owner, Standley said.
Standley understands the need to accommodate the unbridled growth in Las Vegas. But the nonfunctional turf law’s practical applications are messy, he said, and undermine the original legislative intent that residential neighborhoods were not to be affected.
“When the compact was drafted back in 1922 — over 100 years ago — we were a village, a railroad stop between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City to refill the water tenders on the trains,” Standley said. “We became a real city, and yet we never got to change our water amount to reflect growth.”
The Colorado River compact of 1922 gave each of the seven basin states a portion of the river. Nevada has the smallest allotment by far.
A supercharge to climate change?
A well-supported critique McSwain has made is one felt every day of Las Vegas’ summer.
The city, behind Reno, is considered by nonprofit Climate Central as the second-fastest warming in the nation, with a 5.7-degree increase in annual average temperatures from 1970 to 2023.
In the valley, turf removal has led to the demise of many historic trees. A 2024 U.S. Geological Survey study showed that trees provide a 45-degree cooling effect on dangerously hot days in Las Vegas.
Fifty percent of a lawn funded by a water authority rebate is required to be covered by tree canopy, Mack said.
Dying trees are a byproduct of mismanagement, he said. In many cases, homeowners will neglect to water trees while lawns are being converted.
Mack said the water authority is well aware of the urban heat island effect, where pavement and buildings trap heat in the summer. That adds a punishing boost to temperatures in some low-lying neighborhoods without widespread green spaces and trees, such as East Las Vegas and North Las Vegas.
The agency offers a $100 per tree bonus for living trees planted in lawns converted to desert landscaping, and the private and public sectors have programs to plant thousands of new, drought-resistant trees that can withstand the heat.
“The heat island effect has been present in Southern Nevada since the first strip of asphalt was laid, the first concrete sidewalk was poured and the first block wall was constructed,” Mack said. “Expanding our tree canopy, diversifying our tree population and getting that shade is going to be our number one way to combat excessive heat.”
While Mack understands that the water authority’s work is controversial, he said the world has looked to its efforts as a model of what can be done as water resources disappear.
“Media from Germany, France, Spain, Portugal — they come to Las Vegas, and they all do stories that are focused on water conservation,” Mack said. “We have a lot of novel ideas.”
Another voice
In one of her recent trips to Carson City, McSwain was chatting up any legislator who would listen. As a registered lobbyist, she weighs in on new pieces of legislation, in hopes of avoiding another AB 356.
McSwain had disappointing conversations: “SNWA has kind of taken over conservation,” one lawmaker told her.
“The point of the Water Fairness Coalition is for people to realize that there’s more to say on this subject than what SNWA and Las Vegas Valley Water District is spending $35 million a year promoting,” McSwain said. “They’ve been the only word on the matter.”
Aside from pushing for a full refund of excessive use charges, which she feels unfairly target the middle class, McSwain calls on the water authority to stop what she sees as an attack on quality of life. She wants to save the grass and trees that are left.
But more than anything, McSwain hopes for a more open dialogue — something she believes she’s had to force.
“The only way we’re going to solve these problems is if we’re all talking to each other,” she added. “And the water district doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.
