West Jordan, South Jordan, Magna, Kearns and Bluffdale are participating in the district's grant program this year to promote water conservation in their communities. The cities receive $50,000 for submitting a water conservation plan, adopting the district's 2025 goal, demonstrating a decrease in water consumption and matching the grant with 20 percent of their own funds.

South Jordan offers rebates to residents who use smart clocks for irrigation; the Magna Water Improvement District updated its community Web site, www.magnawater.com; the Kearns Improvement District is offering a toilet rebate program; and Bluffdale added water-wise landscaping to its city park and is updating the city's water conservation plan.

West Jordan focuses on public education, offers rebates for water-wise plants and distributes high-pressure, low-water, prerinse nozzles to restaurants.

"We know we're making progress, even though everyone in the state had a bad year last year," said West Jordan management analyst Stephen Glain. "The way we see it, we would have used even more water without all of these programs going on. This year we expect to see an actual drop in water consumption as a result of the water conservation programs."

Utahns use two-thirds of their culinary water for outdoor use, including irrigation, Glotz said. That's one reason the district emphasizes water-wise plants as part of its outreach program to residents. The district's conservation garden Web site, www.conservationgardenpark.org, has a database of Utah-friendly water-wise plants and suggestions for landscaping design.

The district is expanding its 2.5-acre conservation garden by another two acres, which will make it the largest conservation garden in Utah. The garden showcases appropriate plants for Utah's climate and it's more than piles of rocks and clumps of cactuses.

"A lot of people think of a water-wise landscape as a bunch of rocks with a cactus out there or a wagon wheel or something like that, and that's a misconception we want people to get away from," Brown said. "We want to demonstrate a lush type of landscape with a lot of plant choices and options available."

The district hosts free classes on water-wise landscaping throughout the summer that are listed on the district Web site, www.jvwcd.org. The classes focus on how to transition a standard lawn to a more water-wise landscape through a series of conversion steps.

"I don't believe that everyone wants yards full of grass, it's just what people know how to do," said Cynthia Bee, a landscape designer who teaches classes at the district. "We can get people excited about water-wise landscaping because they see pictures of what it looks like and it's beautiful. That's what's in it for me. I want my kids to have water and all of those resources we need for the future and we're just on a collision course. What we're doing presently is simply unsustainable. By no stretch of the imagination can we continue as we're going."

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