Coyote Springs is a planned city in Lincoln and Clark counties near the junction of U.S. Highway 93 and State Highway 168, about 50 miles north of Las Vegas.
Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Conservationists are calling a recent decision by the Nevada Supreme Court updating the state’s water law a significant victory because the ruling paves the way for the state to restrict groundwater pumping if it will affect other users and wildlife.
The court’s decision last month gives the state’s top water official the authority to regulate how underground supplies are distributed. The ruling, a blow to stalled plans for the Coyote Springs master-planned community north of Las Vegas, enhances the survival for an endangered species of fish native only to natural springs in the area.
The Center for Biological Diversity was a respondent in the case to protect the Moapa dace, a rare fish that only resides in the warm springs of the upper Muddy River and earned endangered status in 1967. The Moapa National Wildlife Refuge was established to protect this finger-length fish species, but the proposed Coyote Springs development would infringe on that land.
“We all know there’s too much water coming out of the ground in Nevada, but there’s been a kind of paralysis around what to do about it because no one wants to blink,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Coyote Springs threw that into sharp relief.”
Coyote Springs is about 60 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The proposed master-planned community, plans for which go back to the late 1990s, has a monument sign marking its entrance and a golf course that opened in 2008, but no homes have been built.
In 2002, the Nevada state engineer’s office halted Coyote Springs LLC’s water applications, along with all others in the Coyote Spring Valley, Black Mountains Area, Garnet Valley, Hidden Valley, Muddy River Springs Area, California Wash and Lower Moapa Valley hydrographic basins after the requests exceeded more than 300,000 acre-feet of water annually.
From 2010 to 2012, the office conducted a “pump test” requiring water rights holders in Coyote Spring Valley to draw about 8,050 acre-feet of water each year, about half of the total permitted water rights, to determine how much pumping the basins could take.
The test caused water levels in basins within 1,100 square miles to decline and also affected springs and streams. The Muddy River, the site of some of the earliest water rights in the state and home to the endangered Moapa dace, was among them.
After another eight years of studying the area’s geology, conferring with water rights holders and denying hundreds of water applications for the area, State Engineer Adam Sullivan issued Order 1309 in 2020. The order declared that the Lower White River Flow System was a single hydrographic basin, and that only 8,000 acre-feet could be drawn from the basin annually without harming surrounding water sources.
Determining how to manage interconnected sources of water — and if the state has the authority to do so — has been at the heart of Nevada water law for more than a decade.
Water rights holders sued the state engineer in 2022 in Clark County District Court, claiming the office had no authority to combine hydrologic basins.
John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said the authority joined the case as an appellant on the state engineer’s side. The SNWA has the rights to about 15,000 acre-feet of surface water along the Muddy River.
Unlike Colorado River water, the SNWA’s Muddy River allotment will stay available no matter what future shortages the federal government might declare, making those water rights especially valuable, Entsminger said.
“The science on the interconnection between surface and groundwater is pretty clear, and has been for decades,” Entsminger said. “So, as we move into a warmer, drier future due to climate change, I think it’s important the state engineer has tools like this.”
The ruling is the latest setback for the developers behind the 56,000-acre Coyote Springs planned community. Former lobbyist and attorney Harvey Whittemore tried to launch the development with Thomas and Albert Seeno in the early 2000s, but the Great Recession hit before any of its proposed 150,000 homes were built.
The partners sued each other, and the Seenos eventually regained control of the project.
Attorney Kent Robison, who represented Coyote Springs Investment LLC, said the ruling cost his clients their second priority spot in their original basin.
“Once you start combining basins, even though they’re hydrologically connected, how do you establish priority?” Robison asked. “That’s the question nobody can answer now.”
The Supreme Court ruling did not end the legal fight. It sent the case back to Clark County District Court to decide whether the state engineer gave proper notice before deciding what the justices termed “the absence of a conflict to Muddy River rights.”
Robison said he’s advised his clients the case is heading down “a really long road” before it’s settled.
Meanwhile, Donnelly said regulation within the superbasin could come in the form of strict curtailment by priority, granting the most senior water rights holders their allotment until the maximum sustainable pumping yield is reached, and then cutting off all other rights holders. It would be a first in the state’s history.
Instead, Sullivan could issue a groundwater management plan similar to the one governing Diamond Valley in Eureka County. Under that plan, all water users have their allotments cut in proportion to their water rights and seniority.
Donnelly said the Supreme Court decision probably won’t reduce the number of water rights conflicts that end up in court, but when they do, litigants can no longer argue against the state engineer’s regulatory powers the way Coyote Springs did against Order 1309.
“The State Engineer can now solve an intractable problem,” Donnelly said. “Or at least, he has the tools to solve an intractable problem.”
Donnelly said aquifers lay under the surface across most of the state, made up of water that fell as precipitation during the Pleistocene era between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, when the climate was much wetter. Today, it’s rare for those aquifers to receive any water recharge. In the past 20 years, he said, there has been one boost during an epic rain event in 2005.
In the desert, ecosystems form when a fault or another geologic feature lets groundwater seep or to form a spring or wetland. Pumping water from those aquifers reduces water pressure and can eventually dry up a spring entirely, Donnelly said.
“We’re in the hottest, driest place in Nevada, there is no (aquifer) recharge here,” he said. “And there’s this wildlife refuge hanging on by a thread in terms of how little water those species are relying on.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
