One of the Wet 100 Reacts

I've known Andy Olson for many, many years. He's just about the nicest fellow you'll ever care to meet. He owns a company that organizes big events in Las Vegas, namely major fights and casino openings, that kind of thing. Most recently, he managed the opening of Encore.

Andy has a lovely home. Each year, he hosts an Easter Sunday brunch I usually attend. It's a pretty spread and all, but it's only .67 of an acre and, while it contains five bedrooms, he has lived there by himself for as long as I've known him.

So I was surprised when Andy landed at No. 76 on the Review-Journal's Henry Brean's big exposé on the top 100 water users in Las Vegas yesterday. And his story, I think, shows more than anything how Brean completely missed the real story in his midst because he evidently made absolutely no attempt to reach any of the people on this list.

Had he done so, what he would have learned was that Andy found a water leak last year that had sent his usage and bill through the roof. He didn't notice it at first because he had the bill on auto-pay and didn't look at it often. But last spring -- in a water-saving measure!!! -- he ripped out all his grass and replaced it with wood chips and other desert landscaping. When the bill only went up through the summer, he investigated, found the leak and resolved the matter.

"What I don't understand is, how come you haven't got someone at the water district looking at these usage levels and notifying people that something seems wrong?" Andy said. "I mean, maybe someone could have asked me, 'Are you filling a 3000-square-foot Olympic-sized swimming pool every day?' It was going straight into the ground. There was no flooding or seepage, so I didn't see it."

Olson also noted that his friend, the boxing promoter Don King, chimes in on the list at No. 96 and was No. 1 in usage per square foot. But King doesn't even live there most of the time and it's just a small townhome. Surely there's a leak?

Had Brean tried to contact the people he was shaming, he might have discovered there was this whole other, far more publicly useful, story here: The Southern Nevada Water Authority evidently has no controls in place to alert residents when their water use is so out of whack with their square footage that more likely than not, there's a technical problem.

Brean might also have realized that, while making a list that embarrasses people might be sexy and sell papers, it would have made far more sense to examine in greater detail the per-square-footage usage. That's where he might have found some water abusers, among the people who are using ridiculous amounts of water given the size of their properties and who either don't know or don't care. That a man with a 16-acre estate is using a lot more water than the rest of us isn't a surprise, is it?

And had he given folks like Olson a chance to explain, he would have probably enjoyed the irony that Andy isn't some asshole wantonly drowning his property while the city is parched but a guy who discovered his problem while taking steps to become more water-efficient! Instead, Andy's friends and neighbors are thinking they've finally learned how it is Andy always looks so clean!

Vegas' Wet -- and Silent!?!? -- 100

Beyond Howard Stutz' puzzling decision to allow an anonymous source to issue a potentially devastating allegation against U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, today's paper offered some other interesting bits worthy of comment. Ben Spillman's piece about a poker blogger detained and banned from the Cannery Casino intrigued me because the bottom line is that casinos are not within their lawful rights to force you to surrender or delete your photos. And Keith Rogers has a totally poachable piece about a Vegas man who may have finally found out, 65 years later and against all odds, how his father died during World War II.

But the most interesting topic was today's Wet 100 "expose." In a massive front-page story, reporter Henry Brean outed the alleged top 100 water users in Las Vegas that includes the list, the addresses and even aerial views of the single-family homes that guzzled the most in this drought-stricken town. Many are notables, including: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (No. 2), Greenspun Media Group bosses Danny Greenspun (No. 3) and Brian Greenspun (No. 59), Station Casinos chief Frank Fertitta III (No. 4), Danny Gans (No. 5), Wal-Mart scion Nancy Walton Laurie (No. 9), Phil Ruffin (No. 16), various Wynns (Nos. 15 and 20), heavyweight champ Floyd Mayweather Jr. (No. 47), ex-LVS President Bill Weidner (No. 70), Sheldon Adelson (No. 79), and Don King (No. 96.) King, according to Brean, was tops in terms of usage per square foot. Surprisingly, Siegfried & Roy's lush Little Bavaria isn't on the list.

An eye-catching piece, to be sure, but it shockingly lacks one important element of good journalism: Brean evidently did not attempt to reach a single one of the homeowners whose names, addresses and water-usages are published. Nowhere in the nearly 2,000 words is there any indication that any of the people being shamed were offered a chance to comment. I understand the data came from government records, but government records can be incorrect. And outraged readers -- myself included -- had to be thinking, "What do these people have to say for themselves?"

What's funny is that the subheadline for this package reads, "Top 100 users consime enough water to supply 1,950 homes, but that's only half of the story." Right-o! The half of the story that is missing? The listees' side! Surely in 100 people, there were a few willing to explain, apologize or something. Instead, the only user given a chance to respond was a lady featured in her own little sidebar (which is not linked-to anywhere on the page of the main story, natch) because she apparently kept the bathtub in her mobile home running at full blast for years. She declined.

There's also a public safety concern here. Sheldon Adelson, for instance, was until recently the wealthiest Jewish man in the world and remains perhaps the largest private supporter of Israel. He employs a phalanx of security because he receives lots of death threats. The newspaper today listed what they claim to be his home address. Yet the county assessor's records say the property at that address is in the name of the Paul G Roberts Trust. Roberts is Adelson's lawyer. So it could be Adelson's property or it could be his lawyer's. So either a man who has sincere security reasons not to have his home address published has now been outed or the wrong person has been identified. Ick either way.

Could there be others here who do not live or even still own the property ascribed to them? Who's to know. Nobody asked any of them.

Ever Happen To You?

I'm always fascinated by what y'all see when you arrive at McCarran. Remember the time I noticed the odd image of the cow in a showgirl's headdress to tout the agribusiness of Nevada for reasons I still know not why?

Well, here's a new one I had forgotten was sitting on my camera from my most recent return:


In case it's hard to see, here's what it says:

Vegas waiters aren't being rude,
they're just saving water.
Remember, this is a desert.
Water is served by request only
at participating restaurants.

The billboard is from the Water Conservation Coalition, which is a fancy way of saying the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Vegas region's governmental agency responsible for dealing with water use issues. After rooting around, I found this site, which explains that the Nevada Restaurant Association is working with the SNWA to create the Water Upon Request program.

The site claims that more than 180 restaurants have signed up to participate and some menus even have stickers "that indicate the restaurant's support of conservation by serving water only upon request." They're supposed to look, I believe, like this to your right.

Now, I eat out. A lot. I've never seen such a thing. Have any of you? If so, where? 180 restaurants? Really?

I searched all over the Web and found such old newspaper references to this idea in the Las Vegas press that both writers are now deceased. One was a 2003 Las Vegas Sun column by the late Ruthe Deskin that claimed 120 local restaurants were doing this. Another was a piece in the Review-Journal in March 2004 by the late Rod Smith that didn't actually talk about this as a SNWA program but said that Boyd and Station casinos both has "water upon request" programs in most or all of their restaurants. I was at the TGIF's at Suncoast just tonight and they brought us water without our asking. That's owned by Boyd.

By the by, this order form allows restaurateurs to get menu stickers as well as coasters, pens and paycheck inserts (?!?). Has anyone out there who does NOT work for the Southern Nevada Water Authority ever seen any of these things?