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Washington County needs to get as many residents on board as possible to reach its water conservation goals. That’s why — for the first time — it’s expanding its message to reach the community’s Spanish speakers.
On a recent evening in downtown St. George, a small group made their way into a Catholic church social hall for a class called De Césped A Escénico. It’s the Washington County Water Conservancy District’s first Spanish language workshop about its lawn rebate program, which pays residents and businesses to replace their grass lawns with less thirsty landscaping.
For attendees like Oscar Loya, the county’s water future remains a worry as the region is transformed by growth.
“It’s super important because we have no water and there’s too much construction, too many houses,” he said. “I don’t know where they will find water, and that’s a serious problem because we’re in the desert.”
He has already converted part of his lawn from grass to plants like cacti and palm trees and he feels good about how little water they need. Now he wants more information to pass along to other Spanish speakers in his circle, especially landscapers.
Another attendee, Salvador Guido, has seen the worst-case scenario of what can happen when people don’t take water conservation seriously in a desert community. Where he used to live in rural Mexico, he said the river the town depended on disappeared.
“I remember growing up and seeing this beautiful, pristine river so full of life. You think that it will never run dry. Well, guess what? You mismanage it long enough, it runs completely dry,” he said. “So I kept that in my heart, and now if I see the opportunity to help educate people that that shouldn't happen, I'm more than willing.”
Guido, who is part of this Catholic church’s congregation and helped promote the class, is in the process of eliminating some of the grass at his home, so he was glad to pick up a few landscaping tips. Even more importantly, he came to learn more about how to help others make the switch.
Nearly 12% of Washington County’s population is Hispanic or Latino, but that number is likely much higher among local landscaping professionals, he said. It’s vital to make sure they get more details about the rebate program because they have a lot of sway in what happens in people’s yards.
“I think it's great that the district is taking the effort and trying to communicate in the language of the landscapers. So I'm very grateful that they're trying to do that.”
Ramping up conservation is not merely a nice-to-have goal, it is an integral part of the district’s 20-year water plan. The lawn rebate program and similar efforts are expected to deliver roughly a quarter of the 46,615 acre-feet — around 15 billion gallons — of additional water Washington County will need per year to sustain its growth into the early 2040s.
The county has already replaced more than one million square feet of grass since the program started in late 2022. The district wants to double that number in 2024.
Reaching more of the county’s non-English speakers could help that goal become a reality, said Bryan Loya, the district’s conservation program assistant. Loya led the workshop and shares a family relation with Oscar Loya. He wishes the first class had drawn a larger crowd, but that illustrates the difficult task of launching a new effort like this.
“It is a different market, a different group of people, and you have to change your strategy of how to get to certain groups,” Loya said. “So that's the challenge.”
But this class is just a first step, he said.
The district will test out ways to better market future workshops to the Spanish-speaking community and bring the message to where people already are by having a larger presence at festivals and community events. He hopes the district eventually can translate the message of water conservation into additional languages, too.
It’s all part of sending the message that conservation is for everyone.
“It's not just English speakers here in Washington County; it's people that speak Spanish. And we can't just leave them in the dark about conservation just because we're just explaining conservation in English.”
