The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 141

city: “This is a city built on fantasy, where the normal rules don't apply,” it seems to say.
The water features are an obvious target for conservationists, yet Mulroy contends that
hotels and casinos use water efficiently. “The much maligned Strip uses only three per-
cent of our water [when recycling is taken into account] while providing jobs to tens of
thousands of Nevadans,” she said. “If you were to shut of the canals at the Venetian and
the fountains at the Bellagio, you would affect the mainstay of our economy. The casi-
nos are the largest economic driver in the state, by far. Why would you notinvest three
percent of your water in making them attractive to tourists?”
When Steve Wynn , the legendary casino and hotel developer, was building Treasure
Island, a hotel-casino with a nautical water feature that included a “sea” in which a life-
size replica of a pirate ship does battle with a naval frigate, he wanted to know how to
maintain the illusion of an ocean in the desert. “Double-plumb Treasure Island,” Mulroy
replied. “Use gray water in your features.” And so he did. Treasure Island (now owned
by MGM) recycles wastewater from the showers and sinks in its three thousand rooms
in a reverse-osmosis facility, then pipes it to the hotel's water feature. As a result, Wynn
became an important ally for Mulroy, an advocate for water conservation in the gaming
and hotel industries, and a proponent of the pipeline plan.
Each year, the SNWA spends about $3.5 million to run ads that encourage residents
to conserve water by planting native species (xeriscaping), using low-flow showerheads,
covering swimming pools (to avoid evaporation), watering their grounds at night, and
so on. To a degree, the effort has paid of. Between 2002 and 2008, the population of Las
Vegas grew by four hundred thousand people , yet water consumption dropped by 18
percent, or 15 billion gallons, thanks to conservation. “If you do the slide-rule math, Las
Vegas could keep growing and growing because we constantly reuse our water,” Mulroy
insisted.
In spite of these rosy numbers, however, Las Vegas continues to use more water per
day than many other cities with tenuous drinking supplies. According to the SNWA,
Las Vegans used about 254 gallons of water per capita per day (gpcd) in 2009. Mulroy
has set a goal of 199 gpcd by 2035. But other cities have already done much better: Long
Beach uses 105 gpcd; San Diego, 150 gpcd; and Albuquerque, 175 gpcd.
A survey shows the top one hundred private water users in the Las Vegas val-
ley—including many of the casino owners and real estate developers who have strongly
supported Mulroy's pipeline—use enough water for nearly two thousand homes. One
property, owned by the sultan of Brunei, uses 17 million gallons of water per year, and
Mulroy herself used six hundred and fifty-two thousand gallons in 2010 (when she
suffered “a substantial leak”). A 2007 study by the Paciic Institute , an Oakland, Cali-
fornia, think tank, found that a more aggressive conservation program could save Las
Vegas the same amount of water that the pipeline would take from rural basins. Mulroy