The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 140

In 1978, when she was twenty-five years old, Pat Mulroy was hired as a $13,000-a-year
junior management analyst by Richard Bunker, the Clark County manager, a top polit-
ical office. “I thought I died and went to heaven,” recalled Mulroy, who had been raised
in Germany by an American father and a German mother. Bunker is a Mormon who
doesn't gamble or drink, yet has become one of the state's top casino lobbyists and a ma-
jor force in state politics. Mulroy proved so effective that she was sent to Carson City
to lobby for Clark County before the state legislature. It wasn't glamorous work, but it
taught her how to create legislation and get it passed. In 1989, Mulroy was named gen-
eral manager of the Las Vegas Water District.
In 1991 the district and seven other water companies that service Clark County
formed a cooperative for regional water issues called the Southern Nevada Water
Authority, or SNWA. Pat Mulroy helped to champion the idea, and she was named
the new agency's general manager. Abhorring waste, she embarked on an ambitious
water-conservation program. Lawns, which are not native to the desert and require vast
amounts of water to maintain, were her first target. One study showed that 65 per-
cent of the water flowing to Southwestern suburbs was used to maintain lawns and
wash cars. “People move here from all over, and they bring every water-sucking plant
in the world—bluegrass from Kentucky, magnolias from Florida, roses from England,
lawns from Chicago,” Mulroy said, rolling her eyes. “Newsflash: we live in a desert. If
you choose to live in a desert, then use appropriate landscaping. This need to conquer
nature, the unwillingness to live within the confines of the environment, has got to
change.”
In 2002, she instituted a “cash for grass” incentive program to curtail lawns and
employed water police to ticket excessive watering. People hated the program at first,
but SNWA's carrot-and-stick approach eventually removed over 60 million square feet
of grass—enough, Mulroy claims, “to lay a strip of sod roughly one-third of the way
around Earth.” An SNWA study found that 76 percent of the water used by Las Vegas
went to maintaining lawns; the number has now dropped below 70 percent. Mulroy put
golf courses on a water budget and forced them to rip out most of their nonfield turf,
such as grass on parking-lot dividers. Now, many of them use artificial turf on nonplay-
ing surfaces and have their own weather stations, computerized humidity sensors, and
water-recycling facilities.
Mulroy's next crusade was what she called “the war of the fountains [small, decor-
ative displays] and water features [the dramatic water shows along the Strip].” Many
of Las Vegas's hotels and casinos use large, ornate water features, such as the Bellagio's
famous “dancing fountains.” These spray gorgeously to entice people inside, but they
evaporate many gallons of water in the hundred-plus-degree days of summer. Spraying
water in the desert is a deliberately theatrical gesture, one that sets the tone for the entire