I welcome info from smart people on what I'm about to post. This is just my perception based on ~60 years living in Utah, seeing / hearing about water issues during that time, and watching what actually happens.
Utah, like other upper basin states, utilizes a fair number of sources for household water. Lots of springs, wells, and reservoir systems - mostly fairly local to the community where the water is consumed. The Green / Colorado rivers are not the primary suppliers of household water in Utah (guesstimates say maybe 20%). On a somewhat regular basis, our locally-managed reservoirs are full - and we even have to draw them down, from time to time, to make room for spring runoff. Meaning there is often an amount of use-it-or-lose-it water in the system. We do have droughts - and we're in one now - but that has mostly affected non-culinary water in the past. The glaring exception to this being St George / Washington County. There is also an issue with the shrinking Great Salt Lake due to water consumption prior to arrival (though less likely due to household water usage than industrial / agricultural).
All this to say, I don't think most Utahns have regularly felt compelled to conserve household water. In fact, it wasn't until I was married with kids that the state took any serious action to use anything other than culinary water for lawns and gardens. We now have separately-sourced pressurized irrigation water for outdoor use in many areas of the state.
I agree that we can and should do better. This is becoming especially obvious in southern Utah. Elsewhere, however, the culture of the status quo has been stronger than the perceived urgency to change.
Thanks for the thoughtful post, Bart. It's a valuable inside perspective on what's really happening from someone who's seen a lot over many decades. And I agree with your guesstimate that about 20% of Utah's water supply comes from the Colorado/Green river basin.
As for water conservation, it may indeed be difficult to change cultural norms, but I agree a lot more could and should be done... Here's a few more thoughts about that with numbers...
The population of Washington County was about 180,000 in 2020. Per capita water use there is about 300 gpd. That is an extraordinarily high number. I realize some nearby ag water use is accounted for in the number, but it's still a big number compared to other western metro areas with ag uses on their fringes. Many western cities use less than half that amount per capita. Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix--all of them are well under 150 gpd each. (Examples: Maricopa County is 146 gpd, and the City of Los Angeles is about 70 gpd; Southern California as a whole, which includes a lot of ag lands, is about 115 gpd, a 45% drop since 1990.) So if Washington County could implement water conservation measures to cut per capita use in half to be more in line with those other metro areas (start with the green lawns, but that's just the low hanging fruit), here's the result: you'd save about 30,000 af per year!! And if that county doubles in population one day (as it plans to do), the savings at that point would be 60,000 af compared to what would have otherwise happened.
And that's just in the St. George area.
In other words, applying better water conservation principles (which costs very little) in places that have not done so is an infinitely more effective (and cheaper) way of "finding" new water supplies, especially ones like the Lake Powell pipeline, which would only bring 86,000 af... That project is one of the worst examples I can think of that epitomizes wasted money, time, and resources, all for dubious "benefits" that are much more efficiently achieved by other simpler means...
