This text was initially featured on High Country News.
On a sweltering late April day, a flock of middle-aged males strolled in athleisure, working towards their backswings and rifling balls into the azure sky above the Inexperienced Springs golf group simply exterior St. George, a ballooning metropolis of 100,000 in southwestern Utah. Some 2,000 properties, largely single-family—many with RV garages—orbit the green, like rings round Planet Golf, and extra are on their means.
As in so many cities within the desert West, golf in St. George is a thirsty enterprise, with a robust foyer and a relationship with water painted in inexperienced on the panorama. Amongst its friends, nonetheless, St. George is in a league of its personal. Few cities within the Southwest use extra water per particular person: practically 300 gallons a day. And a hefty portion of that, over half, goes to maintaining decorative grass, lawns and golf programs lush in an arid area the place water provides are dwindling day by day. Inside a decade, and with out instant motion to preserve, native officers predict that its water scarcity will change into a water disaster.
Utah is infamous for granting an uncommon diploma of grace to this type of profligate water use. That could be altering, nonetheless, not less than in the case of the golf trade: In 2022, town of Ivins, an exurb of St. George, successfully banned the development of recent golf programs, whereas early this yr, state Rep. Douglas Welton, R, launched Home Invoice 188, which might require golf programs to be extra clear about how a lot water they use.
In a metropolis and at a time the place one thing’s gotta give, will golf be the primary to fall?
Minutes down the highway from the Inexperienced Springs group, on the Dixie Crimson Hills Golf Course, I joined a gaggle of older gamers staging behind the primary tee. Earlier than we settled on the griddle-hot pleather of our golf carts, Jim Peacock, 80, slapped a top-spinning rocket up and over the tough that his good friend Craig Felt, two years his senior, couldn’t assist however admire. “Jim’s the athlete of the group,” Felt stated. Quickly, the chatter moved to water. “Once I was in Mexico, there was solely sufficient water for 3 flushes. That might occur to us if we don’t listen,” Felt stated. Whereas Tom Smith, 75, indicated that he’d quite quit golf than toilet-flushing, it’s not clear that the remainder of the group is so inclined. “This can be a place the place lots of people do a variety of {golfing},” Greg Milne stated, gesturing towards the sprawl of St. George.
“That’s the way it began. The course was constructed as a type of imaginative and prescient for progress within the space.”
This space’s mingling of desert and water has lengthy attracted folks. Southern Paiute bands lived close to the Virgin River for a millennium or extra earlier than Mormon colonists arrived within the late 1850s, intent on making “Utah’s Dixie” bloom with cotton. For the subsequent century, Washington County remained “a sleepy little group off the I-15 that folks would move by on their method to California,” stated Colby Cowan, director of golf operations for town of St. George. All through the Nineteen Fifties, nuclear blasts at Nevada’s Yucca Flats take a look at vary blew radioactive mud onto the properties of town’s 5,000 residents—mud that stubbornly clung to the valley’s repute.
However in 1965, St. George unveiled the nine-hole Dixie Crimson Hills course, rebranding the Mormon Downwinder outpost as a putter’s paradise. “That’s the way it began. The course was constructed as a type of imaginative and prescient for progress within the space,” stated Cowan. Since then, golf’s position within the regional recreation economic system has burgeoned. The 14 golf programs in Washington County, together with 4 owned by town of St. George, appeal to practically 600,000 guests a yr, producing $130 million {dollars} yearly, in response to Cowan. That places golf on par with mining, quarrying, and oil and gasoline industries within the space, although nonetheless beneath the half-billion dollars generated annually by Zion National Park.
And, like these different industries, golf has political sway. When golf’s water wants got here beneath hearth in Washington County in 2021 and once more within the state Legislature this January, the trade flexed its affect. Golf Alliance Utah, the lobbying wing of the Utah Golf Affiliation, pulled strings on the Statehouse in Salt Lake Metropolis, killing the invoice even after sponsors dropped the annual reporting requirement, arguing that it unfairly focused the game.
Typically, the golf trade tries to burnish its picture by touting its financial advantages and highlighting its efforts to lower water use. “We’re doing our due diligence with water conservation,” Devin Dehlin, the manager director on the Utah Part Skilled Golf Affiliation, stated in a name with Excessive Nation Information. “What the game brings economic-wise is the story we need to inform.” In apply, these modifications have come all the way down to encouraging course operators to exchange some turf with native crops. Different applied sciences, like soil-moisture monitoring and synthetic grass coloring, which provides turf a deep inexperienced look with minimal watering, are being adopted, although strictly on a voluntary foundation. Dehlin stated his group doesn’t observe how widespread these modifications are.
Of the ten thirstiest golf programs in Utah, seven are in Washington County, according to an investigation by the Salt Lake Tribune. Some privately owned programs, together with Coral Canyon Golf Course and SunRiver Golf Membership, really elevated their water use between 2018 and 2022. The mercury tops 100 levels Fahrenheit right here greater than 50 days every year, so it takes an exorbitant quantity of water to maintain the fairways lush year-round: about 177 million gallons yearly for every course, or roughly eight occasions the nationwide common. And if the area continues to develop at its present breakneck price, current water provides—from wells, springs and the Virgin River — will likely be severely strained. That prospect has some native and state officers backing a proposed pipeline that will carry Colorado River water from the ever-shrinking Lake Powell to this nook of the Utah desert. With or with out the pipeline, the area is more likely to face extreme water rationing, with golf and lawns likely seeing the first cuts. Washington County’s forthcoming drought contingency plan might require cities to chop their water use by as much as 30 p.c in a worst-case state of affairs. “And when you look about the place they’d reduce their water utilization,” stated Washington County Water Conservancy District Supervisor Zach Renstrom, “it actually would come to giant grassy areas, akin to golf.”
In a bid to keep away from future mandated cuts, St. George is scrambling to cut back its water use now. Beneath Renstrom’s steerage, town handed sweeping conservation ordinances early this yr—the hardest in Utah, however nonetheless delicate in comparison with these in Las Vegas. Three of the 4 city-owned golf programs now use handled wastewater for irrigation quite than potable or “culinary” grade water. Las Vegas shifted to reused water for almost all of its programs by 2008. Cowan stated the city-owned programs are starting to take away decorative grass from non-play areas. Thus far this yr, the county has eliminated greater than 264,000 sq. ft of grass. Whereas which will sound like quite a bit, it’s solely about six acres throughout all the county, or roughly 4 p.c of 1 native golf course. Even with these measures in place, Renstom says the halcyon days for golf in southwestern Utah want to finish: “I’ve had a few builders come to me not too long ago and need to discuss golf programs, and I flat-out stated, ‘I gained’t present the water.’”
For now, although, the county nonetheless has some water to spare. St. George has secured $60 million for a wastewater treatment plant, all whereas stashing nearly two years of reserves in a community of reservoirs. “We now have a variety of water saved away,” stated Ed Andrechak, water program supervisor for Preserve Southwest Utah, a sustainability advocacy nonprofit. If the county enforced the strict conservation guidelines that Las Vegas has, he believes it might develop on the blistering tempo it’s projected to over the approaching years.
However Andrechak worries that, finally, a culture of profligacy would be the barrier to conservation, not cash or technical know-how: “We simply don’t assume water guidelines apply to us right here,” he stated. Andrechak cataloged a lot of examples: a 1,200-foot lazy river beneath development on the Black Desert golf resort in Ivins; the Desert Coloration group, which constructed round a man-made lake that Andrechak described as a “large evapo-pond”; one other three man-made lakes for the Southern Shores water-skiing-housing advanced in Hurricane, and maybe most bewildering, a Yogi Bear-themed water park east of St. George. The water park would require 5 million gallons or extra of culinary-grade ingesting water yearly for rides like one nicknamed the “Royal Flush,” a rest room bowl-shaped slide. The Sand Hole golf course subsequent door gulps up 60 occasions as a lot water. “We’re 23 years right into a mega drought, and but my wrestle right here is that we’re not likely that involved about it,” Andrechak stated. “That’s the tradition.”
“We’re 23 years right into a mega drought, and but my wrestle right here is that we’re not likely that involved about it.”
This tradition is enabled and even nurtured by coverage: St. George’s water charges are among the many lowest within the West, which leads to larger earnings for course operators and extra reasonably priced inexperienced charges, but additionally disincentivizes conservation. “The entire thought has been to have low (water) charges to care for the residents by making golf reasonably priced,” stated Dehlin. “Having reasonably priced water is essential for the expansion of the sport and to maintain our services within the situations that we do. And that’s one factor about golf programs in Utah typically: they’re very well-manicured, very well-kept,” Dehlin stated. “And sure, well-irrigated.”
Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for Excessive Nation Information primarily based within the Colorado Entrance Vary. E mail him at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Observe Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable.
