Steps taken to get water from Muddy

Wednesday, Dec. 15, 1999 | 10:35 a.m.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority Board is expected to give its blessing Thursday to a new entity that will hold water rights on 3,000 acre-feet of water from the Muddy River and make it available for use in the Las Vegas Valley.

No pipeline exists yet that can deliver water from the Muddy River to Las Vegas, but Southern Nevada water officials are preparing for future growth in a valley where water supply can directly affect the ability to expand.

Nevada is allowed 300,000 acre-feet a year from the Colorado River and has never used the entire amount. But the Las Vegas Valley is expected to need all of that and possibly more in the next five or six years, water authority officials say.

An acre-foot is enough water to serve a family of four or five for a year.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has looked to the Moapa Valley 65 miles northeast of Las Vegas, where the Muddy River runs through farmland, to supply its expected needs in the next 10 to 15 years.

The authority has been quietly arranging to buy options on water rights from a developer and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The water rights have become available as farmers who have raised cattle and alfalfa in the Moapa Valley for decades go out of business, selling their rights back to the Moapa Valley Irrigation District.

In turn, the irrigation company has sold options to developers. Last month the water authority bought $11 million worth of those options from WCMV, a limited liability company managed by developer Rex Lewis and Michael Saltman, both of Las Vegas.

The Mormon Church also has agreed to sell options to the water authority.

The water authority's board is being asked on Thursday to approve a separate entity, the Muddy River Water Holdings Inc., to keep those options in trust until needed, probably sometime after 2015. The water authority itself is not allowed to hold water rights.

The directors of the nonprofit holding company will be water authority Director Pal Mulroy and Deputy Directors David Donnelly and Richard Wimmer.

"This is not a purchase," Donnelly said. The 3,662 acre-feet of water rights from WCMV and the Mormon Church are options, he said.

While the water authority is the regional agency coordinating efforts to squeeze drinking supplies from every available source, the Las Vegas Valley Water District, which distributes most of the valley's water, has held a claim on unallocated ground water rights at Coyote Springs since 1989. However, the state engineer's office has not approved use of those rights because demand for water on the Clark County-Lincoln County border are too great.

In March 1998 the water district spent $25 million for another 8,000 acre-feet of ground water in Coyote Springs from the Coyote Springs Investment Limited Liability Co. The company, owned by Reno developer David Loeb and lobbyist Harvey Whittemore, plans to develop a retirement and resort community in Lincoln County, according to state records.

How would the water authority bring the Muddy River to Las Vegas?

If the Colorado River Basin states -- California, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico -- agreed, the river's water could flow into Lake Mead and be drawn from there. That is unlikely to happen because the federal government frowns on using another source mixed in with Colorado River water, a practice called wheeling, state and federal officials said.

The water authority could also build a pipeline to deliver the Muddy water to the valley, Donnelly said.

The cost is about the same, he said.

"When you add up the costs of drawing the lake's water, treating it and pumping it through the valley, the costs are very comparable to a separate pipeline," Donnelly said.