Growth Besieges the Seemingly Endless Land

Drive down the Las Vegas Strip and take in the sights: the fountains and canals, the marquees that light up the sky for miles, the people pressed shoulder to shoulder and bumper to bumper.

Las Vegas is a desert awash in water and watts, a city built in defiance of its very surroundings. It is at once a triumph of technology and Western gumption, and a reminder of how tenuous it all is.

The great growth in the West followed a simple recipe: Water plus power equals population. There was always a feeling that the land was so big you couldn’t use it up, not the resources, not the space.

Today there are signs that’s no longer true. In California, blackouts. In Oregon and Washington, drought. In Arizona, arsons to stop construction. And in every rearview mirror, more traffic all the time.

The allure of vast prairies, open skies and endless opportunity is what first drew people out West. But as deserts disappear under development, possibilities become problems.

Now, with its infrastructure straining under the crush of growth, the West faces difficult choices: Energy or environment? Freeways or orchards? Water for people or fish?

“It’s the grand irony,” says James Corless, California director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which aims to diversify transportation systems to reduce traffic and pollution caused by growth. “We’re losing what we’ve come for, this ideal. And we are loath to change.”

When the streets went dark in California, a lightbulb came on across the West: After years of explosive growth that brought new people, new businesses, new money and new life to the region, there were new problems.

The power crisis turned a glaring spotlight on the vulnerability of the West. For one very important resource, demand had won out over supply. What about all the others?

“We’ve got serious problems, as we’ve come to learn,” says John Maddox, president of the Denver-based Center for the New West. “We’ve got an infrastructure that can’t really carry much additional power. We’re starting to see the same situation with water.”

And, Maddox notes, the people keep coming.

The West added more than 10 million people in the 1990s, making it the fastest-growing region in the United States. In the next decade another 10 million are expected.

“What does that mean?” Maddox worries. “How many new roads, new water infrastructure and treatment facilities, how many new runways and airports?”

His only answer: “It’s a pretty daunting challenge.”

Perhaps more than clogged freeways and periodic droughts, the power crisis has brought home the reality that there are limits to growth.

In California, electricity consumption rose 24% in the last five years as the economy grew by 29%. However, no major new plants were built in the state in the past 10 years, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Several projects to generate new power were shelved in the 1990s because of regulatory red tape, environmental protests, economics and wariness over the state’s deregulation plan.

As a result, the power ran low and California was forced to go to the open market in search of electricity, sending power rates soaring and shutting out the lights in rolling blackouts.

“It is an absolutely classic example of what happens when, because of a variety of reasons, we neglect to create infrastructure we need,” says Joe Hunter, a former Interior Department official who now works as a power and water specialist at the Center for the New West.

“Too many of us just assume that when we turn the switch, the lights are going to come on. We were perhaps complacent, and we weren’t thinking that someday we could have blackouts.”

Hunter also acknowledges that few planners fully realized the rate of growth that was going to occur.

California officials now predict it will take two to three years before energy production catches up with demand, and the threat of rolling blackouts continues.

Meanwhile, the crisis has crossed state lines. In the Northwest, generating capacity grew by 4% in the 1990s, while demand grew by 24%. That wasn’t a problem when abundant rain and snow produced above-average hydropower generation between 1995 and 2000.

Then drought hit, and generation dropped. This year in Washington, the state’s water supply is projected at only 50% of normal. Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana are about 3,000 megawatts short of the electricity they need.

Now everyone’s playing catch-up. California is on a plant-building spree, while other states are pushing conservation and looking for alternative fuel sources. Northwest labor organizations launched an effort to make electricity-gobbling aluminum smelters energy self-sufficient within five years.

Even in power-hungry Las Vegas, the mega-resorts with their mega-marquees are cutting back. The MGM Grand refitted its 5,000 guest rooms with low-watt fluorescent bulbs and changed its casino-floor lighting. Treasure Island’s parking garage is switching to sodium bulbs that use 30% less energy.

But a feeling of dread is gripping some Westerners. If the lights can go out, what’s next? Dry faucets?

“The thing I worry about is water,” says Carol Ann Heggie-Hall, a retired science teacher who moved from Queens, N.Y., to Henderson, Nev., in 1999. “Is there enough water for everyone and their plants?”

Much of the West is facing the worst drought in a quarter-century, prompting warnings of environmental degradation, forest fires and agricultural decline. Nevertheless, experts like Hunter say the West isn’t in danger of running out of water. The challenge is determining who gets how much.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if the faucets ran dry in Scottsdale, there are places to go to get water,” he says. “But it means shifting it from one use to another.”

About 80% of water in most Western states is used to irrigate crops, a percentage that could drop if residential supplies were strained, Hunter says.

Western states and cities must also do more to share water.

California has long used more than its allocation from the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to seven Western states. An agreement allows California to receive surplus water if it implements conservation measures that will reduce its reliance on the river in the future.

In the meantime, Western cities are looking elsewhere to sustain the supply. The Las Vegas Valley predicts it will reach its annual Colorado River allocation by 2007, so its regional water authority is negotiating to store 1.2 million acre-feet of water in Arizona for the next 15 years.

Beyond power and water, other infrastructure problems persist. In the Las Vegas area, which added 700,000 people in the ‘90s, road closures due to highway expansions are a daily occurrence.

“There are few roads you can drive on that aren’t under construction,” admits Jim Gibson, mayor of Henderson, a city south of Vegas that is among the country’s most rapidly growing communities.

Without the new roads, Vegas transportation officials estimate there would be 2,289 miles of congestion by 2025, compared with 341 miles last year.

But the highways are a two-edged sword: They alleviate congestion but also inspire more growth.

Take Interstate 5, the north-south freeway through Washington and Oregon. Originally planned to connect already populated cities, the freeway itself became a growth magnet. Most of the growth in both states has been along the I-5 corridor.

In Colorado, Interstate 70 has opened the mountains to staggering growth west of Denver.

In the fastest-growing metroplex in the fastest-growing state in the fastest-growing region of the country, Greg Cox and Dale Stark are unloading dirt on a street crammed with construction workers.

The Las Vegas landscapers are a rare breed in a town teeming with newcomers: Cox has lived here all his life; Stark moved from Southern California in 1979.

Both grumble about the changes they’ve seen, and both vow to leave.

“I moved here when this town was nice,” Stark says. “Now you can’t drive down the road without getting cut off and flipped off.”

Cox complains he can barely get around at all. A drive across town used to take 20 minutes. Now, he grunts, “You’ve got to pack a lunch.”

Both agree: Even Las Vegas, the city built on the very idea of unlimited resources and space, is reaching its limits.

The sentiment is spreading across the West: Unbridled growth must stop.

“I don’t think anyone expects growth to continue as it has,” says Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy. “It’s too costly, it’s too burdensome and it really is frustrating.”

In the old days of the “not-in-my-backyard” mentality, nobody blinked when a coal-fired power plant was plopped down in the Nevada desert--not until its smoke obscured the view at the Grand Canyon.

No one worried about clear-cutting the forests or harnessing the rivers. There was always more where that came from. More wood, more water, more room.

No more.

Today many cities see sprawl and infrastructure as their greatest challenges. The Las Vegas Valley has natural growth boundaries that it may reach someday. But what about Phoenix, Denver and Salt Lake City?

Planning experts insist cities must reinvest in old neighborhoods rather than build new ones, and provide incentives to plan for growth in a way that incorporates existing infrastructure.

Portland, Ore., has been a national leader with its urban growth boundary. In San Francisco, one program provides federal money to developers who build homes near transit stops.

“People expect growth to continue,” Katz says. “What they’re saying is we want growth to occur in a different way. In most places what you’re going to see is incremental change.”

But even incremental change has been slow.

Initiatives to rein in growth were on the ballot in several Western states last November, but most of the big measures failed--including one in Arizona to force developers to pay for new infrastructure. Opponents warned that growth controls would be bad for business.

For the most part, growth control has been left to individual cities and towns. But there is little consensus about how to tackle the problem--or even whether there is a problem.

In Las Vegas, despite infrastructure challenges, the official line remains that growth is good.

“As long as you can take care of the social problems and quality-of-life problems, there’s never such a thing as too much growth,” declares Mayor Oscar Goodman. “Once you stop growing, you stagnate.”

And so for now the fountains flow, the marquees shine.

And the people keep coming.