Nevada's AB 356 Turf Ban: What It Means for Your Irrigation Lines

AB 356 targets nonfunctional or ornamental turf — the grass along medians, in business parks, around signage, and in HOA common areas that exists to be looked at rather than used. That turf, when it is irrigated with Colorado River water, has to come out by the end of 2026 across the SNWA area.

The law is a direct response to the drought and to Lake Mead's decline, which we cover in our piece on Las Vegas water pressure and drought. Functional residential lawns — a backyard where kids and pets actually play — are largely exempt, but rebate programs push conversion hard, so a lot of grass is coming out either way.

Every lawn hides infrastructure. Under the grass sits a network of PVC lateral lines, pop-up sprinkler heads, one or more control valves, and a backflow preventer tying it all to your water supply. The grass is only the visible layer.

When the turf is scraped out, all of that plumbing is still down there. If it is simply abandoned in place — heads snapped off, lines left open or crudely capped — you have converted a watering system into a set of buried problems.

Here is the irony. You pulled the turf to save water, but a cracked lateral, a stuck valve, or a line capped in the wrong spot can leak underground and waste it anyway — silently, because there is no longer any grass to show a wet spot.

The fix is to cap the irrigation lines at the manifold or valve, not somewhere out in the middle of a run, so no live pressure is left stranded. That is straightforward residential plumbing work, and it is the difference between a conversion that saves water and one that just moves the waste underground.

Desert landscaping is not zero-water. The trees, shrubs, and accent plants that replace the lawn still need irrigation — just far less, and delivered differently. That usually means converting old spray zones to a drip system, reworking the valve manifold, and confirming the backflow preventer still functions.

This is playing out at scale in the master-planned communities. Summerlin has enormous stretches of HOA common-area turf coming out under AB 356, and every one of those projects is an irrigation-plumbing job underneath. If a buried line is already leaking, our leak detection can find it before you re-landscape over the top of it.

Do not forget the hardware that keeps your drinking water safe. The backflow preventer on your irrigation system stops sprinkler water from siphoning back into the household supply, and it needs to stay intact and functional through any conversion.

While the system is opened up is the ideal time to check it, along with the valves and pressure regulation feeding the zones. We fold that into our seasonal plumbing maintenance checklist so nothing gets missed.