Wednesday, April 15, 1998 | 9:18 a.m.
The move by the Southern Nevada Water Authority comes despite concerns over how the water could be transported to the Las Vegas Valley.
The Coyote Springs well, 60 miles north of Las Vegas, just below the Lincoln County line, could provide some 7,500 acre feet annually to the valley. That water will be needed in about six years. An acre-foot, which covers one acre to the depth of one foot, is enough water to meet the needs of a household for a year.
A plan to move the water south by pumping it into Lake Mead and letting it flow down to Las Vegas is illegal under current Colorado River system regulations. Efforts to change those rules failed in 1995, and Nevada and federal officials say any move to try again would meet with opposition from neighboring states, who say they could lose water.
If that method can't be used, the best alternative is to build a 60-mile pipeline directly to Las Vegas at an estimated cost of $25 million, said David Donnelly, the authority's deputy general manager.
"We would just build a pipeline, but it's still cheaper than many other options to bring more water to the valley," Donnelly said. "We don't disagree whether (flowing the water on Lake Mead) is controversial, but we always do have the option of building the pipe if we have to."
The deal for water rights would cost about $25 million, plus interest, to be paid to Coyote Springs Investments LLC over nine years. The company, a development firm that lists major Reno lobbyist Harvey Whittemore as an owner, holds an option to buy 42,000 acres of land in Lincoln and Clark counties from Aerojet General, a U.S. military contractor. The well on that parcel was dug about 20 years ago to provide water for a government missile project that never came to fruition, and it is one of the largest untapped wells ever drilled in the state, Donnelly said.
The method of rolling the water down Lake Mead, known as "wheeling," would be the cheapest. It requires only that a channel be built to the nearby Muddy River in the Moapa Valley or directly to Lake Mead. Arizona and California officials are likely to oppose wheeling because they fear Nevada might remove more water from the lake than it puts in, depleting their states' share farther south on the Colorado River.
"It would be extremely difficult for them to get that through," said LeGrand Neilson, assistant regional director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Lower Colorado River office in Boulder City. "The Southern Nevada Water Authority has hopes, but that will be a very long and difficult process. I'm not sure its possible."
By 2030, Southern Nevada will need an additional 80,000 acre-feet of water more than the allotment Southern Nevada gets from the Colorado River, which is 300,000 acre-feet. This means that the 7,500 acre-feet is nearly 10 percent of that goal, he said.
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