During Las Vegas DSA’s local convention in July 2022, the chapter voted to make the Cultivating Desert Power: Water Conservation Campaign one of our priorities for 2022-2023.
Cultivating Desert Power: Water Conservation will have a primary goal of lobbying the Clark County Commission to change the Las Vegas Valley Water District’s fee structure to be a true progressive fee structure to discourage heavy water users, and to reassign the proceeds of the existing sales tax water fee subsidy to increase affordable housing in Clark County. These efforts will be driven by both working directly with commissioners who already support progressive fee structures and by running a pressure campaign in coalition with community partners.
Cultivating Desert Power: Water Conservation will also work on increasing equity in green spaces across the Las Vegas Valley, particularly in marginalized communities in East and North Las Vegas where the lack of tree shade contributes to “urban heat islands” that make increasing temperatures due to climate change even less tolerable and they will work to plant native or near-native trees and other plants that are drought-tolerant and will not further exacerbate the water crisis.
Cultivating Desert Power: Water Conservation will advocate for building distributive solar on already disturbed lands, brownfields and urban surfaces to protect habitat on public lands from large utility-scale solar and energy projects that threaten the Mojave Desert ecosystem.
Cultivating Desert Power: Water Conservation will also promote education on both ecosocialism as a theory and issues related to the environment in southern Nevada, both to its members and to the general public.