Walk the three-mile loop around Anthem Country Club this year and you will pass construction fencing that was not there a couple of years ago. Not around a teardown-rebuild on one of the custom lots, but around Anthem Hills Park, where sod has been pulled up in sections and young trees staked into bare dirt. A few hundred yards inside the gates, the golf course carries its own version of the same story, most visible each winter when the fairways are meant to go dormant on schedule rather than by neglect.
Neither of these is decline. Both are the tail end of a project that started inside the club's own gates four years ago, and the timing of the two is not a coincidence.
The Course Closed for 5.5 Months. Nobody Complained.
In the summer of 2022, Anthem Country Club shut its golf course down entirely. Not for a partial reseed or a green here and there. Every fairway and every green, torn out and replaced. The course reopened on December 2, 2022, and the reason had nothing to do with playability. Board president Tim Slattery told the Las Vegas Review-Journal the decision came down to Lake Mead, plainly: the club could see the drought in the lake level the same way everyone else could, and members chose to act rather than wait for a mandate.
General manager Shelley Caiazzo did not soften it either. The club, she said, would not have undertaken a renovation of that scope "were it not for the ongoing water drought conditions in Southern Nevada." The greens work had already been planned. Extending it to every fairway was a deliberate response to conditions that were only getting worse, not an incidental upgrade tacked on for good press.
The math backed the closure up. Converting roughly 1.7 million square feet of turf to drought-tolerant grass cut the course's annual water use by an estimated 30 million gallons, close to a 30 percent reduction. Course superintendent James Symons pointed to a secondary benefit: the new grass eliminates the need for fall overseeding, a practice that used to burn through water every year just to keep the course green through winter.
It was a club deciding to absorb months of closed fairways and a members' assessment because the alternative, waiting for the state to force the issue, would have cost more later.
The Number Behind the Number
The 2022 fairway project was the largest single move, but not the only one. Add up everything Anthem Country Club has done over the past several years and the totals get harder to dismiss as a marketing line: 362,611 square feet of what the club calls "useless" grass removed outright, saving nearly 20 million gallons a year. Another 1,795 square feet swapped for artificial turf. And 1,793,590 square feet converted to water-smart grass varieties, saving close to 39.5 million gallons annually on its own.
Stack it together and the club's cumulative turf conservation work now saves close to 60 million gallons of water every year. In 2023, the City of Henderson created a new award specifically to recognize the effort, its first-ever water conservation award, and gave it to Anthem Country Club. Priscilla Howell, the city's Director of Utility Services, called it a difficult transformation to pull off at scale and one with a lasting effect on the region's most limited resource.
That kind of number only means something next to a baseline. For comparison, the entire Southern Nevada golf industry, working through the Water Smart Landscapes rebate program since the early 2000s, has converted more than 400 million square feet of turf and saved a combined 2.2 billion gallons. Anthem Country Club's 60 million gallons is a meaningful slice of that industry-wide number, generated by a single member-owned club that decided to move early rather than wait.
Why Anthem Hills Park Looks Different This Year
Here is where the story leaves the golf course and becomes a neighborhood story. The City of Henderson has its own turf removal program running across the city's parks, and Anthem Hills Park, less than two miles from the Country Club gates, is on the list.
The city's plan for Anthem Hills Park calls for removing roughly 17,000 square feet of decorative turf, saving close to 780,000 gallons of water a year at that location alone. It is a small piece of a much larger citywide effort. When the full program wraps up in 2026, the city expects it will have removed more than 2 million square feet of decorative grass, converted another 2 million square feet to drought-tolerant varieties, and added 34 new trees, netting nearly 150 million gallons in annual savings across every park in the project.
As of a 2024 accounting from the city, the numbers looked like this:
- 51 parks identified for the program, 11 completed
- 287,013 square feet of turf removed, roughly the size of five football fields
- Nearly 59 million gallons saved annually from the work done to date
- More than $1 million received back in state rebates
- 292 trees added, 166 removed as part of site assessments
The timing lines up with a 2021 Nevada law that phases out the use of Colorado River water on nonfunctional turf, meaning decorative grass in medians, streetscapes, and other spots nobody actually uses, on commercial, multi-family, and government-owned land. That deadline lands at the end of 2026. City parks fall under it. Anthem Hills Park's construction fencing this year is the visible evidence of a state mandate meeting a city calendar.
What This Doesn't Mean for Your Own Yard
The law that is reshaping Anthem Hills Park does not touch private, single-family yards. Front and back lawns at individual homes inside Anthem Country Club are exempt from the nonfunctional turf restriction entirely. If your grass still looks the way it always has, that is not an oversight. It is the law working exactly as written.
Homeowners who want to convert anyway, whether to cut a water bill or simply match the look of the course, still have access to cash-back programs through the Southern Nevada Water Authority for removing grass and replacing it with drip-irrigated planting. Rates and thresholds shift from year to year, so the right move before starting a project is a direct check with SNWA on current terms rather than relying on a number that may already be out of date by the time work begins.
The Walk Around the Loop, This Fall
None of this changes what makes the daily rhythm at Anthem Country Club worth showing up for. The 3-mile loop that circles the community still gets walkers and dog owners every morning before the heat sets in. The Black Mountain Trailhead, four miles out and backing up to Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area, is still the closer option once the weather turns. Harmony Park's nine-hole disc course, tucked next to Anthem Hills Park, still runs quiet on weekday afternoons.
What is different is that some of what you are walking past, on the course and at the park, is mid-transition rather than finished. The patches you will see go dormant on certain fairways once temperatures drop in late fall are the new Bermuda grass doing exactly what it was replanted to do, not a sign of neglect. The bare sections at Anthem Hills Park are the last stretch of a project the city has been running in phases for years, with a firm finish line in 2026. Both are visible this year because both are close to done, not because either one is struggling.
For a community that has spent years being asked to conserve, it is worth knowing exactly what the club already gave up, and what the city still owes.
At Team Emanuele & Owens Real Estate, we track the details that shape daily life in the communities we work in, not just the ones that show up in a listing description. If you are weighing a move within Anthem Country Club, evaluating a property near the course, or simply want a straight answer on how these conservation projects affect resale conditions down the line, Request a Private Consultation and we will walk you through what we're seeing on the ground.
