Water usage up sharply

Water usage in Boulder City was up significantly in 2024.

Utility Director Joe Stubitz reported as much to the city council in his annual report last week. And, while the top-line number of a 14% increase (from 2.5 billion gallons to almost 2.9 billion gallons) is interesting, a deeper and perhaps more revealing picture can be seen when one digs into the numbers.

The numbers cited here all come from a spreadsheet that Stubitz provided to the council at their last meeting.

“We did see an increase of just over 11% in total consumption from 6,681-acre feet in ‘23 to 8,546 acre feet in 2024,” Stubitz told the council. “This increase in consumption matched the single-family residence increase in consumption. We did break down the change in water consumption per customer class and provided that as a handout and can go into further detail, if there’s any questions.”

Only Councilman Steve Walton asked him to break the numbers down. Walton also serves as Boulder City’s representative on the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

“If I heard you correctly,” Walton said, “You said as we broke it out the residential use is where we’ve seen the increase, that the residential use followed the average. So the total increase was 11% and that was in line with the same increase as single-family residence. So do you want to comment on that a little bit, please? I mean, based on the numbers that you see, that’s indoor water use.”

Not quite.

“So, it’s outdoor water usage that is increasing,” Stubitz replied.

“And would we say that the majority of the increase of the outdoor water use has been in residential?” Walton asked.

And that is where the 11% increase, which is in line with the residential increase framing, kind of came apart.

“State, county and federal government, that went up 27%” Stubitz replied. “The municipal golf courses went up 30%, and the city accounts went up 22%”

What’s driving the increase?

While Stubitz talked at the meeting in terms of acre-feet, the materials he provided to the council were all listed in gallons. An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land in one foot of water. It’s 325,851 gallons.

First, the amount of increase overall as listed in the spreadsheet was 14%, not 11%. This only counts potable water and that number is rounded up. The actual number is 13.7%. All of the single-family homes in Boulder City combined increased by 10%, or 71.7 million gallons. Multi-family residential properties went up by about 7%.

Schools went up by just 1%. Parks, counting only potable water, went up 4%. (Parks, schools, golf courses and other municipal properties use a mix of potable and raw water. Potable water is treated to be safe for drinking while raw water comes in on a separate line directly from Lake Mead.) That figure may not be totally accurate as, in years past, the usage report broke out potable and raw water for parks. In this year’s spreadsheet, only potable water is listed for parks. In 2023, just shy of 9 million gallons of raw water was used in city parks.

The biggest change, both in terms of percentages and in the overall number of gallons used can be chalked up to two properties: The Boulder City Municipal Golf Course and Boulder Creek Golf Course.

Yes, there are three golf courses in town when one includes the city-owned, but privately run, Cascata. But it would not be fair or accurate to say that the issue is in the overall category of golf courses.

That is because Cascata’s water usage rose 3% in terms of potable water and 9% in terms of raw water.

By way of comparison, Muni and Boulder Creek combined for a potable water increase of 23% from 271,660,000 gallons to 354,051,000 gallons. This represents an increase of 82.4 million gallons of potable water.

Raw (irrigation) water use at those two courses went up 26% from 315,005,000 to 424,941,000 gallons.

Note that as a commercial business, Cascata pays the commercial retail rate for water while the municipal and Boulder Creek are charged the lower wholesale rate as they are city-owned and city-run.

“Is it safe to make the assumption,” Walton asked, “That as the air is drier and hotter, it’s going to require more water to maintain the current landscape status?” He noted that the region had just recently ended a more than 200-day stretch with no measurable rain.

Stubitz replied, saying that was a reasonable assumption.

Walton continued citing the history of proposed — and then rejected when golf course-adjacent residents complained — turf reductions at the municipal golf course. He noted that the current plan is to do limited reduction along with fixing the aged and leaking irrigation system and then see how much water is actually saved over the course of a year.

“We’ve made the changes or we’ve agreed to the proposed changes to the municipal golf course for some turf reduction. And we were, as discussed in the meetings going to see how that worked out and then measure the amount of reduction that actually occurred and compare it against the standard of acre-feet per irrigable acre over a year, right?” Walton asked.

“Correct,” Stubitz replied.

“By the time it’s done, we may be hotter and drier than we were and and we may still be chasing that number and who knows when we’ll catch up to it honestly,” Walton said.

“Is that a fair statement?” he asked.

“I mean, it’s speculative, yes. But it could be,” Stubitz replied.

Walton wrapped up, saying, “I think it’s important that we all — wherever we are, whether it’s our business or our residents — do all that we can to comply with the water reduction and water management.” He closed his remarks by noting that SNWA was still offering, for a limited period, incentives for property owners to reduce turf that needs water.

Golf courses were not mentioned again.