(Kaleb Roedel/Mountain West News Bureau via AP
Marty Plaskett, a hay farmer in Diamond Valley, stands near one of his irrigation pivots that’s watering his alfalfa field on Sept. 2, 2022.
Friday, Dec. 29, 2023 | 2 a.m.
A conservation program financed by the federal government is hoping to lure property owners in parts of Nevada to surrender their groundwater rights, but the eligible landowners must decide before the end of January whether to accept the cash-for-water-rights offer.
The Voluntary Water Rights Retirement Program is for groundwater basins that are overpumped and overappropriated in northern and central Nevada communities, said Jeff Fontaine, the executive director of the two Nevada water authorities — Central Nevada Regional Water Authority and the Humboldt River Basin Water Authority — utilizing the program to reduce water demand.
The program uses $15 million of state funding from the federal American Rescue Plan Act for these water authorities to buy back groundwater rights from private landowners. The landowners would retain their land, but the water rights would be retired, meaning that area of groundwater can never be pumped or allocated to private landowners ever again.
It is prioritizing overpumped basins, which will be purchased at the higher rate of $900 per acre-foot, compared with the rate of $350 per acre-foot for overappropriated basins, Fontaine said. An overpumped basin is one that is pumped at a greater rate than it is replenished.
The program is for landowners in Churchill, Elko, Esmeralda, Eureka, Humboldt, Lander, Nye, Pershing and White Pine counties. Fontaine said there have been seven total applications for the program so far and multiple inquiries.
“We can’t continue down the path we’ve been doing for the past 50 years. You know, the groundwater table levels are dropping,” Nevada state Sen. Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka, said.
Goicoechea was the lead sponsor of Senate Bill 176 in the 2023 Nevada Legislature. The bill was supported by conservation groups and would have allowed the state to buy water rights and retire them. But the legislation never made it to a floor vote.
Nevertheless, the veteran lawmaker remains an enthusiastic supporter of the current program.
“We’re seeing in some of these basins significant subsidence, and you know — once those aquifers collapse you can’t rebuild them,” he said. “So it’s time we face the issue: The fact that we’ve got more water on the books than we’ve got water, and so it’s time to deal with it.”
That’s especially true of Diamond Valley, a farming community at the edge of Eureka which has been designated as the state’s only critical management area by the Nevada State Water Engineer, Fontaine said.
This designation means that Diamond Valley’s groundwater levels are declining, and that people who own water rights in this area are required to come up with a plan to address this issue. If the plan isn’t good enough, the state engineer would be obligated to “issue a curtailment order for that basin,” he said.
The program is prioritizing groundwater rights in Diamond Valley, which will be purchased at $800 per acre-foot. The seven applications received through Thursday — the window opened at the end of November and goes through Jan. 22 — were from both the Central Nevada and Humboldt River Basin buyback programs, and they’ve also had multiple inquiries, Fontaine said.
Fontaine said they must present the Nevada Department of Conservation & Natural Resources with a “list of willing sellers” by Feb. 1. That means the landowners, including farmers, have a limited window of time to decide whether to hand over their water rights and essentially end their farming of the land.
It’s a tough decision, he admits.
In Southern Nevada, a similar project has been initiated on a smaller scale.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is partnering with Moapa Valley Water District to use American Rescue Plan Act funding to purchase groundwater rights from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Muddy River area of Moapa Valley.
The authority and water district are in talks to negotiate the purchase of 2,329 acre-feet of water at $2,575.60 per acre-foot, for a total of $6 million. The two water agencies have received a grant to cover $3 million of the project and will match the remaining $3 million.
The springs influencing the Muddy River have some environmental importance, as they are home to some animal species with unique needs.
“They provide habitat for the threatened and endangered Moapa dace,” says Bronson Mack, public outreach manager at Las Vegas Valley Water District and Southern Nevada Water Authority. “That is an endemic fish species, which basically means it’s found nowhere else on Earth except right there in those springs.”
The springs are also a habitat for the bird species southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-bellied cuckoo, both of which are threatened.
Mack says the groundwater rights in question aren’t being used but were previously leased for industrial purposes. The benefit of this buyback, he says, is that these groundwater rights can’t be sold to anyone else in the future. This blocks the possibility of a potential future buyer who would pump and sell water for similar industrial purposes.
“And that reduces demand on that overappropriated basin,” Mack says. “There is more water that has been committed within that basin than there actually is water available in that basin, right? So we’re helping to now bring that basin and the amount of water rights into some equilibrium.”
The effort to reduce water demand isn’t limited to Nevada.
The Nevada chapter of the Nature Conservancy said water rights buyback programs have also been enacted in Oregon, Colorado and Kansas.
The group created a database of environmental fixtures that indicate the presence of groundwater-dependent ecosystems.
“These are the ecosystems that rely on groundwater for their structure and function,” said Laurel Saito, strategy director for water of the Nevada chapter.
The groundwater-dependent ecosystems they map include springs, wetlands, lakes, rivers and streams together, and groups of phreatophytes, which are “plants that have roots that can tap into groundwater.”
The group’s map assisted officials with the water rights retirement program with their planning, Fontaine said.
Saito says that if groundwater use in this region continued on its current trajectory, without this buyback program, these groundwater-dependent ecosystems could disappear after losing their water. This is concerning because it would affect human recreation, as well as the rare and endemic species housed in this area, she said.
“I think that this is a unique opportunity to try to be, I guess, more proactive about, you know, bringing water back into balance,” she said.
