California salmon could affect LV water

Friday, Dec. 17, 1999 | 11:22 a.m.

The future of Las Vegas' drinking water is riding on the backs of California salmon, according to author Marc Reisner.

Reisner, who spoke to 600 members of the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting at Caesars Palace today, fears that if the federal government puts the salmon on the endangered species list, efforts by California to supply enough water for the fish will have to come out of the Colorado River.

Eighty percent of the California's salmon and steelhead populations have been lost since 1950, Reisner said. Every major river in the Sierra Nevada mountain range has impassable dams that block the salmon from reaching their spawning sites.

"Nature has been the loser so far," Reisner said. "In California, it is increasingly difficult for the San Joaquin Valley and urban Southern California to divert water from the Delta (in central California), water that forms the basis of their remarkable economies.

"And that has potential repercussions for all Colorado River water users," he said, including Nevada which receives 300,000 acre feet a year from the river, the smallest amount of any of the seven Western states that share the river's water.

California water users declared a drought in the state earlier this month. And the Golden State is struggling to live within its 4.4 million acre-foot-a-year limit from the Colorado River as mandated by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

"The salmon populations are aimed at extinction," Reisner said, which could mean an official listing as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. If that happens, Southern California and Southern Nevada could feel the pinch.

To save the salmon, California and Washington and Oregon need to propose a plan for the fish and implement it, even if it means removing smaller dams from Northwestern rivers, he said. And logging has to stop along the rivers to stop thousands of tons of sediment from polluting the waters.

Southern California cannot take 2 million acre-feet away from Northern California's supply if salmon are declared endangered, Reisner said. To save the fish might require 800,000 acre-feet a year, which might very well force Southern California to turn to the Colorado River to make up the water used in the north.

That amount of water is almost three times what Nevada is allowed to take out of the Colorado River annually.

"It's time we got together and manage the water resources in the West as a single system," Reisner said.

That is exactly what Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy has been asking the seven states to do. If not all seven, at least the Lower Colorado River Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona should work together to manage the river, she said.

Reisner has nothing but praise for the way Las Vegas is handling its small water allowance from the river, an amount that was set in the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act.

"I'm a big fan of Las Vegas," he said after his speech. "It has probably become the most progressive city in the West for conserving water, pricing water to conserve it and reusing water."

But without water imported from the Colorado through Lake Mead, Las Vegas would not exist today, he said. Ground water supplies dried up in the Las Vegas Valley in the mid-1950s.

Sacramento and Reno don't even require water meters, Reisner noted.

"That's absurd, that's a shame, that's foolish in this day and age," he said.

Reisner also likes the way Nevada teamed up with Arizona to allow banking water underground in Arizona to offset dry years.

And he supports trading water among the Western states. He is a director of Vidler Water Company, Inc., which is starting water storage in the Coachella Valley in Arizona.

Reisner predicts that Colorado River water one day will be bought and sold in an open market system that replaces federal bureaucracy and old water rules.

But first and foremost, he said, the West has to repair its watersheds, offer spawning habitat to the fish, develop new water supplies and manage current resources.