One size fits all. That’s great for hats in the Zion National Park gift shop but not for water conservation goals.
So at the start of this decade — and for the first time — Utah figured it would ditch that statewide approach and set goals that account for regional differences in water supplies and uses.
After all, life in Salt Lake County isn’t like living in the eastern rural counties along the Colorado border. Water, as it turns out, “is very hyperlocal,” said Candice Hasenyager, director of the Utah Division of Water Resources.
The Beehive State needs to do more with less as growth, climate change and Colorado River uncertainties stress its limited water supply.
To meet a statewide conservation goal of 16%, the decade-long effort aims to reduce the water used in homes, schools and businesses. Individual targets were set for each county to make it happen. Farm irrigation isn’t part of it — there are other ways to save water there. While it’s true that most of Utah’s water goes to agriculture, “ag is not always where the people are,” Hasenyager said. So, how Utahns conserve in cities and towns still matters.
Halfway through the initiative, however, the results are mixed.
“There are some areas that have already exceeded the goals, which is great,” Hasenyager said. “Then there are other areas that we know need to do a lot more work.”
Fifteen of Utah’s 29 counties have reached their annual 2030 goals at least once in the past two years. That list of success stories ranges from the most populated county, Salt Lake, to the least, Daggett. Washington, Iron and Tooele counties hit their targets in at least one recent year, too. But 14 other counties have not, including Weber, Juab and Box Elder.
Four rural counties in Utah’s Colorado River Basin — Carbon, Duchesne, Uintah and Wayne — are a microcosm of the state’s successes and struggles.
Take Carbon County and its goal is to use an average of 239 gallons per person per day by 2030. That would be an 11% decrease from the 267 gallons it used in 2015, the state’s baseline year for the reduction targets.
In 2024, the county used 197 gallons per person per day, the fifth lowest rate in the state. That’s even less per capita than urban Salt Lake and Utah counties. So, they beat their goal last year.
Uintah met its goal in 2023, years ahead of the deadline.
It’s a different story for Duchesne and Wayne. Both are using more water than they did a decade ago.
Talking about saving water matters
Seemingly similar counties — like, say, Duchesne and Uintah or Salt Lake and Weber — have seen very different outcomes. The reasons behind such disparities range from money to lot sizes to local economies.
It also comes down to the priorities of local leaders and how they talk about saving water. Ultimately, that trickles down to influence people’s behavior.
“People need to be convinced there's a need and a purpose for undertaking water conservation activities,” said Joanna Endter-Wada, a Utah State University water policy and sociology of conservation researcher.
It can take time — years — for the message to sink in and shift a community’s culture. So, how long and how vigorously a county has emphasized conservation can make a difference.
Wayne County uses more water per person than any other part of Utah, in excess of 900 gallons per capita per day.
That doesn’t surprise Mickey Wright, a retired software engineer who’s the mayor of Torrey. It’s a town of 332 people near Capitol Reef National Park.
“I think our focus hasn't been enough on water,” Wright said. To him, the biggest barrier to conservation is shifting from an individualistic to collective mindset.
“We don't think of ourselves as being that significant, that my little bit doesn't have that much effect.”
Wright grew up in rural southern Colorado and remembers a life of water rationing. When he first came to Utah to meet his wife’s family, he was struck by all the green lawns.
Now, he wants Torrey to start setting a better example.
Outside the old fire station repurposed as the city office, Wright walked across a patch of grass whose days are numbered. By next spring, he said it’ll become a high desert garden with native grasses and flowers. The idea is to inspire residents and businesses to do something similar.
Wright remains hopeful Wayne County can turn things around and hit its goal in the next five years, but he acknowledges change can be difficult. When he pitched a grass removal rebate program earlier in his term, he had a hard time getting support.
But the alternative to conservation is expensive. Torrey will need more water as it grows, the mayor said, which would require pipeline projects to bring it in that could easily top $5 million.
“The less water we use, the less millions we've got to go find,” Wright said. “That's the argument I've got to make.”
People are trying to start a similar conversation to the north of Wayne in Duchesne County. It uses the sixth most water per capita in Utah and would need to cut back by more than 40% to reach its 2030 goal.
They’re part of the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, which stretches from Orem to the Colorado border. That’s a lot of ground to cover, so Savannah Peterson, one of the district’s water conservation programs coordinators, knows she needs to speak everyone's language.
“Using words like ‘xeriscaping’ or ‘waterwise’ in more urban areas is a really popular thing. But in our rural areas, we talk about ‘drought resiliency,’” Peterson said. “We're trying to meet people where they are in terms of their understanding of the water situation.”
The district already offers rebates to help Duchesne residents replace leaky toilets, upgrade sprinkler controls or remove thirsty lawns. But folks often think of those programs as a city thing, and they may not even realize it’s available to them.
“Water districts have sometimes been seen as the bad guy,” she said. “But we want to make sure that people know we're a resource.”
Ryan Goodrich has faced conservation misconceptions, too. He manages the Ashley Valley Water & Sewer Improvement District in neighboring Uintah County near Vernal.
Over the past decade, his team has worked to dispel common myths, like the thought that conserving locally means sending more water downstream to California. The reality, he said, is that saving water stores it in Uintah’s reservoirs.
As drought set in this spring, his district raised its rates and told customers why.
“People don't like being told what to do, and so my message to that is: We don't tell them what to do. We explain the situation and let them pick,” Goodrich said.
That meant choosing between paying a higher bill or trying to cut back, he said, “but if they don't understand the underlying reason for it, they're not going to do it.”
Uintah’s local efforts appear to be paying off. It hit the state’s 2030 goal in 2023 with 209 gallons per capita per day, before slipping back above the target line in 2024.
Between the higher water rates and a new outreach plan of radio ads, text messages and flyers, Goodrich said his district has cut water use by roughly another 20% this year.
It’s great to see how far Uintah has come with conservation, Goodrich said, but it’s no time to rest on their laurels.
“We are doing a pretty good job. We can do better,” he said. “This year was the year that we said we have to do better, because we just don't have the water.”
The size of a community’s wallet matters, too
Clear, consistent communication isn’t the only thing that can help residents save more water. Small towns may have just one person managing their water system, Endter-Wada said, while bigger cities have a whole staff of water conservation experts.
The more resources a community has, the more likely they’ll be able to implement conservation efforts such as lawn replacement incentives and hiring employees to manage those programs.
“At the end of the day,” Hasenyager, the state water director, said, “conservation costs money.”
There are real barriers in places with fewer people and smaller budgets. That’s the case in Myton, a town of 662 in Duchesne County.
Water is so vital to life in this part of northeast Utah that Myton showcases a ragged wooden pipeline from the early 20th century in its museum. But even the pipes that carry Myton’s water into town today have problems. Many are nearing 50 years old and leak badly, Mayor Kathleen Cooper said. Those pipes routinely lost more than a fifth of the town’s water over the past decade.
But Myton doesn’t have the money to replace them.
“I don't know who you blame,” Cooper said. “All I know is that I need water pipes, and we only have 600 people.”
Around a quarter of the town’s residents live below the poverty line. That’s more than triple the state average. It also overlaps with Ute tribal land and around one-sixth of its residents are Native.
“We don't have a bunch of oil barons living in Myton that could raise our property rates so that we would get more money,” Cooper said. “So, we have to rely heavily on grants.”
And those federal funds dwindle by the second, she said.
On top of that, small towns face a competitive disadvantage. If they apply for grants, Endter-Wada said, they’re often up against urban and suburban communities that hire outside consultants to juice up their proposals.
When rural areas do get their hands on the money, it’s easy to see the impact. Look at the town of Helper, in Carbon County, just south of Duchesne.
Along a highway in Price Canyon, Mayor Lenise Peterman rested her hand on a rusted pile of scrap from a pipeline that brought water to town for 70 years. Before they replaced it, the town of 2,680 people lost about half its water before it ever made it to someone’s kitchen sink.
Helper made it happen thanks to $3.4 million in federal post-pandemic funds. That’s nearly double the town’s entire annual budget, Peterman said.
“We were fortunate to get that funding and to make it happen,” she said.
“We knew we weren't doing that well,” the mayor added. “It wasn't that we weren't trying, it was that the infrastructure was failing us.”
With the new pipe installed, Helper can focus on next steps for saving more water. For example, the mayor wants to start a program in the local schools to teach kids about conservation.
The nearby town of Price also has a leaky pipeline that’s nearly a century old. City council member Terry Willis said they recently snagged around $5 million in grants and $10 million in loans to replace it.
“When you have to say millions, it makes your heart beat a little bit and makes your stomach churn a little bit,” Willis said. “But it's the reality of what it is.”
Price and Helper are both in Carbon County, which has already met its 2030 goal.
Between hotter, drier weather and concerns about the future of the Colorado River, there’s urgency for communities to keep going.
“We watch the climate change, and it has continued to change since I've lived here,” Willis said as she stood next to the Price River, which can dry up during drought. So, conservation has to be at “the forefront of everything we do. Because without water, the community will fail.”
Mayor Cooper said Myton has applied for federal and state checks, too. In the past couple of years, the town has gotten outside funds to replace water meters and launch an app for residents to check their water use.
She wants to do more, though. And hasn’t given up yet.
“I'm always hopeful,” Cooper said with a laugh. “You have to be in Myton. That's all we have left is hope.”
When water props up rural economies and larger homes
In 2023, homes were the top water users in Uintah and Carbon counties’ municipal districts. Most commercial, institutional and industrial customers didn’t come close.
Residential was also the leading user in every Wayne County district except one. That was in Torrey, Capitol Reef National Park’s gateway town, where the commercial sector used the most.
That likely points to one influencing factor: tourism. People staying at hotels, resorts and RV parks may use Torrey’s water, but they aren’t counted in its population.
Visitors spent $54.8 million in Wayne County in 2023, according to data from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. That means tourism brought in $21,720 per resident — significantly higher than tourism’s relative impact in Duchesne ($2,581 per resident), Carbon ($4,309) or Uintah ($6,253).
Wayne has a small population, 2,543, and visitors could have an outsized impact on its per capita numbers. Still, a small number of residents hasn’t stopped neighboring Garfield County — home to 5,115 people and Bryce Canyon National Park — from decreasing its water use since 2015, while Wayne’s has gone up.
Duchesne may not have as much tourism, but it ranks high for fossil fuel extraction. In a 2021 letter to President Joe Biden, local leaders described the county as Utah’s top crude oil producer and No. 3 for natural gas.
In Duchesne’s Johnson Water Improvement District, industrial customers used 689,441,942 gallons 2023. That’s more than five times what the district’s residents used that year and nearly twice as much as all the homes in Roosevelt, the county’s largest city. On its website, the district says it provides a “substantial amount of water” to the oil and gas industry.
Other industrial uses, such as data centers and processing plants, can have similar impacts on water in rural areas, Endter-Wada said.
“So, it's really not just a reflection on the individual behaviors of the residents in the area, but it reflects the economy as a whole,” she said.
When water props up the local economy, it is hard to cut back. That illustrates why it’s important to be cautious about the types of new industries Utah leaders welcome, Hasenyager said.
Large rural lot sizes also skew the data, Endter-Wada said, because more than half of Utah’s residential water gets sprayed onto lawns and gardens. If you have a family of five living on a small tract in the city, they’re likely to use less water than a family of five on a sprawling property in the country.
“Distribute that water use over a smaller population,” Endter-Wada said and “you'll see greater gallons per capita per day numbers.”
Wayne has the largest average lot size in Utah, more than triple Salt Lake County’s, according to state data. Duchesne’s lot sizes are in the middle of the pack — similar to the average in Utah County and smaller than Uintah’s.
Another factor is that the state has to estimate much of Wayne’s water use, Hasenyager said, because there aren’t enough meters tracking the actual gallons. Installing measuring devices for all of Utah’s secondary water systems, which generally go to landscaping, is another state goal for 2030.
Until then, there may be some farm irrigation inadvertently counted with the county’s city water.
“I'm pretty convinced that [Wayne’s data] has agricultural water in it, and we need to try to dig into that,” Hasenyager said
The state is also digging into potential changes to the 2030 goals.
Right now, the target reductions are based on each county’s average water use from 2015. The state may soon use the average from 2015 to 2019 as the baseline instead. That change would bring Wayne and Duchesne closer to hitting the mark, but their 2024 water use would still be significantly higher than those updated goals.
Utah may also start using a percentage to reflect how close each county is to its goal, Hasenyager said, rather than the specific amount of water it uses.
Other changes have already happened. In 2025, the Legislature directed Utah’s five most populous counties to report their consumptive water use, rather than total water use. That allows a county to subtract return flows — the gallons that go back into the water system — from its sum and results in a lower per capita figure. This story relies on the total water use for those five counties rather than consumptive use to maintain a direct comparison with the counties’ data from 2015-2019 and with the data from the other 24 counties.
Despite around half the state’s counties falling short of their 2030 goals so far, Hasenyager said Utah is in a much better place than it was five years ago.
“There are more programs now than ever before that are encouraging water conservation from all different levels — from the state, from the districts, from the local water suppliers,” she said. “So, I'm really hopeful and confident that more of our counties will meet those 2030 goals.”
There’s no penalty for those who don’t meet their goals by the end of the decade. But communities who aren’t careful with their water, Hasenyager said, could face natural consequences in such a dry state.
This story was reported in partnership with KSL-TV and the Colorado River Collaborative, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
