Washington County has a grand plan to stretch its limited water supply into the 2040s.
It includes reusing wastewater, building reservoirs, removing thirsty grass from golf courses and paying people to ditch their lawns altogether. As southwest Utah continues to grow, it’ll take all of those pieces and more to sustain desert communities like St. George.
“We're trying to find every single drop of water and utilize every drop of water the best way we know how,” said Washington County Water Conservancy District General Manager Zach Renstrom.
“We have $100,000,000 projects and we have a-couple-million-dollar projects, but they're all required to make sure we reach our 20-year goal.”
In the ground beneath one St. George neighborhood, another part of that plan is taking shape.
Between rows of homes built during the city’s recent boom, a construction crane hoisted a piece of pink pipeline over a trench dug into the road. This is part of a $2.8 million project to connect South Mesa Elementary School, Crimson Ridge Park, Silkwood Park and roughly 100 homes in the Little Valley neighborhood to the city’s secondary water system.
“Those two parks and the one school consume about 10 million gallons of water a year on their outside watering, so that'll be able to free that up for culinary water,” said St. George Water Services Manager Scott Taylor.
Water arrives at homes in two general categories. There’s culinary, or drinking water. Then there’s secondary water, which is not treated to drinking standards and is typically meant for irrigation. So, as St. George stops feeding its grass drinking water, that will leave more of it for the city’s growing number of kitchen sinks.
This isn’t a new concept, Taylor said. St. George has been sending secondary water to some schools and parks for the past two decades. As the city has expanded, however, it’s required extra work to keep up.
“We've got most of the parks and schools off of culinary water, but there are still some in the further extents of the city where we're actively pursuing projects to extend the irrigation system to them,” Taylor said.
Eventually, the plan is to link the secondary water connections with the city’s sewage reclamation system and the reservoirs that hold the recycled wastewater it produces. Reusing water is an essential, $1 billion component of the 20-year plan that’s expected to provide more than half of the new water the area will need as it grows.
Finding ways to keep some green space in this desert landscape is also a key part of maintaining the community’s high quality of life, Renstrom said.
“This is a great project to show that you can have these beautiful areas, great playgrounds where kids can recreate, but still protect our water sources.”
If leaders are encouraging residents to remove their lawns, it helps, he said, to have big grassy areas at neighborhood parks and schools for people to enjoy. And if those common spaces draw irrigation from recycled wastewater, they become all the more sustainable.
Ultimately, Renstrom said this interconnected system of conserving and reusing water and then piping it to where it’s needed offers a glimpse into what it will take to sustain life in the increasingly arid West.
“This is how everybody in the western United States is moving forward,” Renstrom said. “The communities that want to be a thriving community in the future, they need to be looking at the example of St. George and what they're doing.”
