Sunday, Sept. 10, 2006 | 7:35 a.m.
The war over water enters a new battlefield Monday as advocates and opponents directly debate Southern Nevada's controversial plan to take billions of gallons from wells in the rural, east-central part of the state and deliver them more than 200 miles south to the Las Vegas Valley.
The $2 billion ground water plan has generated headlines from California to Washington, D.C., and historical comparisons to the massive water projects that built modern Los Angeles.
At stake for the political and economic leadership of Southern Nevada: nothing less than the economic survival of growth-addicted Las Vegas.
Opponents use similar apocalyptic language: the survival of wildlife, farms, ranches and the potential for future growth in rural White Pine County. The hearing - scheduled to last three weeks in Carson City - promises to be a critical battleground in what began decades ago and could take years to resolve.
Nevada State Engineer Tracy Taylor will hear arguments for and against the Southern Nevada Water Authority's plan to draw water from the deep aquifer beneath White Pine County's Spring Valley. Half of the 180,000 acre-feet - nearly 33 billion gallons - the Water Authority wants would come from this single valley. Taylor is the state's chief administrator for such water issues, essentially the judge who must decide who gets how much.
For the Water Authority, approval is critical. It would provide a buffer from reliability concerns about the drought- stricken Colorado River, which now provides nearly all of Southern Nevada's water. The planned network of wells and pipelines through White Pine, Lincoln and Clark counties would also bring the juice to nourish continued urban expansion.
Kay Brothers, Water Authority deputy general manager, and her colleagues argue the water they want to take from Spring Valley is there, and unused. Additionally, the authority officials say that the growth of Las Vegas is a beneficial use as defined by state law. Those factors, Brothers says, mean the water will flow from Spring Valley to Las Vegas.
"The ground water is absolutely critical to this valley," she says, referring to metropolitan Las Vegas.
Opponents do not trust the Water Authority's promises to mitigate and limit environmental and property damage. They compare the program to the notorious Los Angeles purchase and exploitation of water rights in the Owens Valley, 200 miles north in the Sierra Nevada. That engineering effort, completed in 1913, provided the water to fuel the California city's early boom but turned the Owens Valley into a dust bowl.
"These hearings are about the largest water grab in the last 100 years, since Los Angeles turned the Owens Valley from a thriving agricultural community to an ecological wasteland," says Bob Fulkerson, director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, a group that has become an outspoken opponent of the ground water plan.
Fulkerson compares Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy to William Mulholland, the man who built Los Angeles' water system.
"Neither Mulroy nor Mulholland said they wanted to do damage, but there will be damage, just as there was in the Owens Valley," Fulkerson says. "There's no getting around that."
Not so, say the Water Authority officials. They insist that through careful management of multiple wells, slowing pumping down at one well and increasing water flow at another, they will avoid making a far larger Owens Valley in eastern Nevada. There will be localized effects, but no large-scale significant impacts, they say.
The agency is buying two ranches in the Spring Valley with 8,500 acres, and more importantly, huge amounts of water rights used to irrigate crops and meadows for cattle: a total of almost 17,000 acre-feet annually, or almost 5.5 billion gallons.
The ranch purchases haven't made all their neighbors happy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns a 4,000-acre cattle ranch in the Spring Valley, last month asked Taylor to delay the hearings until federal studies on the potential impacts are completed, probably next year.
Taylor, who said earlier this week he would not comment on the Water Authority's applications outside the upcoming hearings, could take months to decide on the issue. Brothers says she doesn't expect a decision until next spring, but the timing is up to Taylor.
Whatever the decision, it's not likely to be the last word .
Federal agencies, particularly the Bureau of Land Management, still have to sign off on an environmental impact review of the pipelines and wells.
And already the issue has entered the courts. Opponents of the Water Authority's effort have filed a lawsuit seeking to open up the state engineer's process to people who did not file protests when the Las Vegas Valley Water District filed its initial applications for the rural water back in 1989.
The Water District, retailer to customers in the city of Las Vegas and unincorporated Clark County, transferred its applications to its sister agency, the Water Authority, a decade later. By state law, only those people who filed protests during the original filing in 1989 can formally protest during the upcoming hearings, Taylor ruled in July.
A month later, opponents represented by the Western Environmental Law Center sued to protest the applications formally.
Both sides have said they could seek to overturn the state engineer's decision. The Legislature could also become involved if either side sees a need to change state law.
Mulroy angrily denied threatening the state engineer when she noted in August that the governor - likely to be a new one, elected in November, by the time a decision is made - could replace Taylor.
Mulroy said her comment, in response to an editor's question, was a description of how the state engineer is selected, not a threat, but opponents nonetheless accused the Water Authority chief of attempting to taint the proceedings.
Both sides claim the weight of evidence in the actual hearings is with them.
"I do know that our case is incredibly strong," Fulkerson says. "From the hydrological reports and the modeling that I've seen, the water is simply not there in the volume that SNWA pretends it is. I'm confident that the state engineer will agree."
Water Authority officials insist they are equally confident. State law says if water in a basin such as the Spring Valley is not being used, and someone can put it to beneficial use, the approval will come, Brothers says.
In earlier contentious applications to withdraw ground water, previous state engineers have granted a portion of the request, which allows observers to monitor the impact of the withdrawal over time. Brothers says the Spring Valley application is fundamentally different.
The 91,000 acre-feet annually that the Water Authority is requesting is what is unused by ranchers in the valley, the remaining "perennial yield," she says.
To back up that claim, the agency has booked 50 potential witnesses, some of them among the most powerful industrial and political figures in Nevada: Bill Bible, president of the Nevada Resort Association; Steve Holloway, executive vice president of the Associated General Contractors trade group; Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO labor group; the mayors of Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas; and Jennifer Lewis, president of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association.
On the technical side, eight hydrologists, four biologists, five geologists and two former Nevada state engineers also are potential witnesses for the Water Authority.
Against this formidable assembly, the law center, representing the protesters, has 15 witnesses: a pair of hydrologists, three biologists, a trio of economic experts, a pair of Spring Valley ranchers, and all five White Pine County commissioners.
The Water Authority is probably going to dodge another group of potential protesters. Federal land-management agencies - the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs - were as of Friday still in negotiations with the Southern Nevada agency but are expected to pull their protests in exchange for promises of environmental mitigation and protection.
Matt Kenna, attorney for the Western Environmental Law Center, says that while the Water Authority may have more witnesses - and more economic and political clout - the science is with the ranchers and environmentalists.
"We remain confident that the evidence shows the water is not there," he says. "If they pull 90,000 acre-feet out of the Spring Valley, it would devastate the valley."
The Water Authority, naturally, maintains that the science backs up its view of the ground water resources.
Which leaves the state engineer.
"That's why we have the hearings," Brothers says. "That's why we have the process where the experts can be heard."
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