A plant with spiraling, star-shaped white flowers started popping up in Karen Goodfellow’s yard this year.
She and her husband had recently ripped up the last 1,000 square feet of lawn at their St. George home. Despite being in their 70s, they did the labor themselves: They rented an excavator, installed drip irrigation, planted trees and bushes and created a swale — a ditch to capture rain water and slow its flow through the yard.
(Karen Goodfellow) Salt heliotrope and clover grow where a lawn once was in the yard of Karen and Scott Goodfellow in St. George on Saturday, August 2, 2025. Mulch and a river rock swale also make up the family’s new water-efficient landscape.
When the little white flowers bloomed, Goodfellow didn’t know if she should pull them or not. She called a local nursery and learned it was a native plant called salt heliotrope, so she let it stay. “I don’t care if it [takes over],” she said.
Goodfellow, board vice president and water program manager at Conserve Southwest Utah, is one of many residents in the St. George area who have traded out their lawns for desert plants in recent years.
(Karen Goodfellow) Grass and Texas sage grow in Karen and Scott Goodfellow’s yard in August 2023 before they converted their yard to water-efficient landscaping.
St. George and surrounding towns in Washington County have replaced nearly three million square feet of grass with water-efficient landscaping since 2023, according to the Washington County Water Conservancy District.
That’s more residential lawn replacement per capita over the past two years than Las Vegas — a national leader in turf removal — said Doug Bennett, district conservation manager, in a press statement.
“In fairness, Las Vegas has already done a tremendous amount of work, but our stats demonstrate our community’s commitment to using the resource efficiently,” Bennett added.
(Mark Eddington | The Salt Lake Tribune) Doug Bennett, Washington County Water Conservancy District conservation manager, discusses water issues at a climate conference at Utah Tech University.
Bennett knows Las Vegas’ lawn replacement program well: He oversaw it at the Southern Nevada Water Authority for two decades before tackling water conservation in southwest Utah.
The Washington County Water Conservancy District first launched its Water Efficient Landscape Program in December 2022. St. George area residents’ interest has been increasing each year, with lawn conversions more than doubling since 2023, according to the district.
The program offers rebates, including $2 per square foot up to 5,000 square feet and $1 per square foot for more than 5,000 square feet of lawn replaced. Based on responses to district surveys, Bennett said, residents are spending on average $5 to $6 per square foot converted. So the rebate is covering roughly 40% of the cost on average.
While residents will save money on their water bill after they rip up their lawn, some people resist the change because they don’t want to take on the upfront costs, said Goodfellow.
Others don’t want to sign the required conservation easement, Goodfellow added, which requires homeowners to keep the water-efficient landscaping in perpetuity. And some simply don’t want to remove their lawn, or don’t understand why they should have to use less water while the county and towns continue to approve more development.
To that, Goodfellow said, “My main mission is to help people understand that grass doesn’t grow in the desert and that we’re unnaturally taxing our system to do that.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Water-efficient landscapes are mixed in with traditional grass lawns in St. George on Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
Water and cost savings
Conservation efforts have saved Washington County water and money, the district said.
“When we look at the utility and the cost to our water customers, this is our least expensive way to develop new water resources,” Bennett said.
Typically it costs the district $30,000 to develop an acre foot of water through building new infrastructure such as a pipeline. Through turf removal, Bennett said, the district is increasing its water supply for half the cost.
The district found that about 40% of the grass in the St. George region is purely decorative — as opposed to grass used for recreational purposes such as parks — and only walked on by “the person who comes to push the lawn mower around once a week,” Bennett said.
The district decided to focus its conservation efforts on the voluntary landscape conversion program, it said in a statement, “because lawns use four times more water than trees and shrubs.”
So far, the program has saved roughly 120 million gallons of water per year, Bennett told The Tribune.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Retiree Ofelia Cortez, one of many St. George residents who has taken advantage of the Water Efficient Landscape Rebate was pleased with her results, pictured on Tuesday, June 11, 2024. She enjoys the savings from using less water and not having to pay a gardener to look after her lawn.
In addition to the landscape conversion program, the district’s eight municipalities adopted new water efficiency standards in 2023 that prohibit lawns in new commercial, institutional and industrial developments except in places where appropriate for recreation, such as at a childcare center.
The standards also limit lawns in new residential developments to 8% of the lot size or 2,500 square feet — whichever is less.
Overall, water conservation efforts have reduced the St. George area’s per capita water use by almost 50% since 2000, according to the district.
A moment of opportunity
Even though southwest Utah may be flipping more turf on a per capita basis than Las Vegas in recent years, the two are in dramatically different phases of their landscape conversion programs.
“This program is fairly new and young in St George,” Bennett said. “So we’re probably right now dealing with some of the most receptive customers.”
In contrast, the Southern Nevada Water Authority first began incentivizing residents to remove grass in 1999. Since then, it has converted 246 million square feet of lawn to water-efficient landscaping, said Bronson Mack, public information officer with the authority. That’s led to 13.7 billion gallons of water saved per year.
“Las Vegas has gone from being a city in the desert to being a desert city, and that is because of the improvements that we have made in water efficiency as a community,” Mack said
(Joe Buglewicz/The New York Times) Residential buildings in the rapidly expanding neighborhoods southwest of downtown Las Vegas, March 28, 2022.
Since southern Nevada’s program has been around for over two decades, those who still have decorative grass in the Las Vegas area “may be some of the most resistant” to removing their lawn, Bennett said.
An investigation by ProPublica found that southern Nevada’s program is seeing “diminishing returns” as the “easy-to-get grass” runs out and resistance from homeowners associations continues.
Southwest Utah has long to go before it reaches that point, though. While residents have removed nearly three million square feet of turf the past two years, there’s roughly 72 million square feet of grass, primarily residential front lawns, in Washington County, according to the district.
“We’re moving at what we think is a really good pace, but there’s an extraordinary amount of remaining opportunity,” Bennett said.
Learning from Las Vegas
Bennett attributes the early success of the district’s lawn conversion effort to program design. He learned the importance of that while overseeing the nation’s leading examples of grass removal in southern Nevada.
There, he learned the importance of creating a smooth and efficient process for users. That includes a simple application and automated systems that keep customers updated at each step.
“If you look at some of the comments we get back on surveys and stuff, people are almost shocked that the government communicated effectively with them, that they got their check quickly,” Bennett said. “You know, those are things they don’t often expect from what they consider to be a bureaucracy.”
The district has also supported efforts that demonstrate what’s possible. Last year, Goodfellow and her colleagues at Conserve Southwest Utah organized the first Parade of Gardens Southern Utah, a self-guided tour of water-wise home landscapes in Washington County.
(Molly Graf) A walk way in the yard of Molly Graf, one of 10 homeowners featured in the Parade of Gardens Southern Utah in September 2024. The event is aimed at showing people how to replace lawns with more water-efficient landscaping.
When she brought the idea to Bennett, he quickly jumped on board and told her he did something similar in Las Vegas. The district provided staff time and resources, such as printed signs, to support the event, which included 10 homes visited by nearly 500 tour takers.
“It was a smashing success,” Goodfellow said.
The second annual Parade of Gardens will take place this September 19-21.
The rest of the year, residents can also take weekly workshops the district hosts on topics ranging from lawn alternatives to drip irrigation.
Bennett believes all these efforts will help southwest Utah be a leader in water conservation.
“Las Vegas was long considered to be one of the most squanderous water-using cities in the West, and it’s completely transformed its reputation,” he said. “And I think St. George has that potential, too.”
Comments are closed.