Cash for grass: Colorado bill would pay to abandon lawns
By CONRAD SWANSON
The Denver Post
DENVER (AP) — Colorado lawmakers are considering a proposal to offer financial incentives to home and business owners to abandon their lawns and green strips. Those lawns take up about half the water used in Colorado’s cities. A bipartisan bill calls for launching a statewide turf replacement program that would pay homeowners and business owners to replace their non-native, ornamental lawns with plants and landscapes better adapted to the state’s dry climate. The replacement would be entirely voluntary. Similar programs across the West have saved billions of gallons of water by paying property owners anywhere from a few dimes to a few dollars for every square foot of turf they replace.
