The Clark County Planning Commission held a briefing on September 1, 2026, at 6:00 PM at the Clark County Government Center. The meeting included a presentation from the Las Vegas Valley Water District on water conservation and drought conditions, a staff review of upcoming agenda items, and public comments. No votes were taken during this briefing.
Okay, it is time to start our meeting for September 1st. So I'm calling the meeting to order. Staff, please do roll call. Chair Frazier. Oh, Vice Chair Mohica. Present. Commissioner Stone. Here. Commissioner Kirk. Here. Commissioner Kalarske. Commissioner Brady. Here. Commissioner Whitman. Here. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Our next item on the agenda would be a presentation from Las Vegas Valley Water District. Thank you for coming this evening. Is it Army? Okay, yes, excellent. Okay. So my name is Doah Ross. I'm the deputy general manager for engineering and operations for the Las Vegas Valley Water District as well as the Southern Nevada Water Authority. And coming to give you kind of a briefing as to where we are with our water today. Speaking on Southern Nevada Water Authority, we are the regional water supplier for the 2.4 million residents that live here in Southern Nevada, and the Las Vegas Valley Water District is the largest of the retailers who deliver water directly to the customers. So our system, SMWA system delivers water to City of Henderson, North Las Vegas, City of Boulder City, Las Vegas Valley Water District, who serves all of unincorporated Clark County and the City of Las Vegas. And then we also deliver water to Nellis Air Force Base. Obviously, everybody here knows we are in a severe drought. In fact, we're more inclined to call this the permanent erodification of the Southwest because a drought implies you actually can come out of that with a couple years of good wet weather. Unfortunately, we've seen the decline of the Colorado River over the past couple decades, with 2002 being the driest year on record, and that started our several decade drought that we are in today. You can see Lake Lake Mead, the same picture taken over the years, and today the lake sits at about 27% capacity. Our biggest benefit in this community is our return flow credit. What that means is every gallon of water that we take out of Lake Mead, our allotment of the Colorado River. If we use that water indoors and it's connected to the public sewer system, the wastewater treatment agencies collect that water, treat it to near drinking water standards, return it to the Las Vegas wash, which is Mother Nature's kidney, and it further filters it and brings it back out to the lake. Every gallon that we return to the lake in that manner does not go against our allotment. So that means we can keep using water and keep returning water. So our goals for conservation are always going to be on what we call consumptive use, which is anything that is used or lost outdoors. Consider landscape irrigation, septic systems because they're not connected to the sewer, evaporative cooling. Any of those types of things, we don't get that water back, and that's a permanent loss to the system, and it goes against our amount that we're allowed to use. Obviously, uncertain futures. So our legal allocation from the Colorado River is 300,000 acre feet of water. That's about 1.8% of the river. In comparison, California, for example, gets 4.4 million acre feet. So Nevada gets 300,000 acre feet. Now we have already drought restriction in placement in place right now that says under a tier one shortage, and it's based on the elevation of Lake Mead, that we would be allowed to only take out 279,000 acre feet of water. Because of that return flow credit cycle I showed you in the last slide, 2025, we actually only consumptively used 198,000 acre feet of water. So you can see we're using less than our allotment. There is the worst case scenario under the record of decision that was just dropped by the Department of Interior a little over a week ago. They have the ability under that record of decision to cut us to as low as 86,000 acre feet.