New rule to ease water woes

Thursday, Oct. 28, 1999 | 11:10 a.m.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is announcing today a flexible rule that will allow Nevada, Arizona and California to share the Colorado River to meet increasing water demands in the growing Southwest.

The Offstream Storage Rule creates "flexibility, certainty and efficiency on the Lower Colorado River," Babbitt said. It is a market approach that has been tried informally between states for the past 10 years. The rule formalizes that approach.

"This rule represents a historic step toward water management on the Colorado River in the 21st Century," Babbitt said. "We now have a framework in place to facilitate management of the river."

The rule leaves the Law of the River intact. The 1922 law sets limits on how much each state can take from the river each year.

California gets 4.4 million acre feet, Arizona 2.8 million acre feet and Nevada 300,000 acre feet. The trouble is that the states have no say in who gets the surplus water. The Interior secretary calls the shots on unused water every year.

Babbitt said negotiations between the states on how to share and store unused river water can begin under a standard process outlined in the rule. It is expected to be published on Friday.

Babbitt is creating a way for a state such as Nevada to pay for storing up to 1.2 million acre feet of extra water out of the river, putting it underground in Arizona, like a bank account for a non-rainy day. That means an extra 100,000 acre feet a year for the Las Vegas Valley.

California has been receiving most of the river's surplus water, as much as 5.2 million acre feet a year, because Nevada and Arizona have not used their full shares. Booming population growth in the Southwest has pushed the states to the limit. Babbitt has already reined in California's thirst for more water, so Arizona and Nevada can have a chance at any annual surplus.

Without a better way to share the river, however, Southern Nevada cannot use more Colorado water beyond its share after 2007. Thus, Babbitt agreed to offer a better way. With voluntary agreements between states under the new rule, local officials believe the Las Vegas Valley can meet water needs through 2025.

A Nevada water official called the rule one of the most important developments on the lower Colorado River, which supplies almost 30 million people in the three states with water for drinking and irrigating.

"This is probably the most significant thing to happen on the river in the last 25 years," Colorado River Commission Chairman Richard Bunker said. The commission acts as a liason between the state and the federal government.

When a drought or too much demand occurs on the river, Nevada could notify the Interior secretary that it needed to draw from its water savings account. Instead of pumping from Arizona, Nevada would draw extra water from Lake Mead while Arizona uses its underground reserves instead of the river.

Arizona is using 2.6 million acre feet of its share already. The water bank solution also will allow Nevada to help Arizona pay for the $2 billion Central Arizona Project, a canal system to deliver more river water to Phoenix and Tucson.

Arizona received approval from Congress to bank water for its cities in 1996 as a way to pay for the Central Arizona Project. However, Tucson residents have been fighting to turn the tap off after they complained that the river's mineral-ladened water ate through their pipes and tasted awful.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and water authority general manager Pat Mulroy have spent the past three years working on a way to expand Nevada's share of the Colorado above 300,000 acre feet a year.

The new rule does not change the laws governing how the seven western states share the river, Reid said. The other states are Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.

"While it may seem unfair, Nevada will probably never receive a greater share of Colorado River water than it does today," Reid said in a statement. "This new rule will help create a marketplace where communities can turn for new water sources to meet the demands of growth or economic development."

Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., said the rule was a major breakthrough for Nevada, comparing it to the construction of Hoover Dam and the Southern Nevada Water System. "This is the breakthrough we've been looking for for years," Bryan said. "This is good news for Southern Nevada. This is big stuff."

There are major obstacles the states must overcome before they can bank water, Southern Nevada Water Authority Deputy General Manager David Donnelly said.

As California, Arizona and Nevada negotiate an agreement, environmental concerns loom, Donnelly said. Issues such as endangered species, Indian tribe rights, which take precedence over the states and how much Southern Nevada will pay for the costs of storing the water need to be ironed out, he said.

Even if the water bank works, Southern Nevada still needs to push for more conservation and other sources such as Virgin River and Coyote Springs supplies.

"The proposed rule satisfies us and satisfies the other states," Donnelly said.

One critic, retired UNLV biologist Larry Paulson, said water banking is too expensive. "It is going to cost us," Paulson said of Southern Nevada water customers.