Biologist immersed in LV Wash debate

Sunday, Jan. 30, 2000 | 10:22 a.m.

Larry Paulson is a frustrated man.

For three decades, sometimes with allies and sometimes without, the 54-year-old retired UNLV biologist has waged a campaign to change the way the Las Vegas Valley uses and disposes of water.

What he wants to do is nothing short of a wet revolution: Paulson wants to stop putting treated waste water back into Lake Mead, a decades-old practice that he insists has eroded the environmentally sensitive Las Vegas Wash and added contamination to the lake and the Colorado River.

But that waste water, returned to the lake, is the only thing that allows the region to draw billions of gallons each year out of the lake in a complex formula dubbed "return flow credits."

Ideas for his revolution started when Paulson was a graduate student studying Lake Mead and the wash in the 1970s. Since then, he has seen the Las Vegas Wash mutate from swampy wetlands to an eroded gully.

Paulson also has seen water quality degrade in Lake Mead, which supplies most of the drinking water for the valley. He blames today's system for pumping contaminated water back to homes in the valley through a water intake a few miles downstream from the wash outflow -- and ties it to incidents such as the cryptosporidium outbreak in 1994 that killed 43 people and sickened another 132. Returning waste water to the lake through the eroded wash is the culprit, he believes. But as the valley's population has grown in the last two decades, he has seen the region become increasingly dependent on return flow credits so it can suck up more water from the lake.

He's disturbed about those changes, so much so that he has decided to run for Clark County commissioner so he can effect the regional water use policy.

Although nobody really knows how much it would cost to abandon the present system, he argues that reclaiming the water and using it for irrigation and other purposes would, in the long run, be cheaper than using drinking water to irrigate thousands of acres in the valley. Paulson has his supporters among the region's environmentalist community, and to some degree among public officials that he criticizes. However, public officials sharply disagree when Paulson charges that they aren't responding to the water issues that he has raised.

Those officials include Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that works with local agencies to bring water to 1.3 million people.

Not that Mulroy and the dozens of other officials disagree that there are problems with the Las Vegas Wash and contamination flowing into Lake Mead. In fact, Mulroy says "the No. 1 priority" for the water authority is restoring the wash's once-lush wetlands.

Wetlands aren't just important because they provide a habitat for hundreds of species of flora and fauna. They also work as a cleansing mechanism, filtering contamination out of the water flowing through the wash.

But "there's very little wetland left in the wash," says David James, a UNLV environmental engineer who worked with the 28-agency coordinating team trying to re-establish those wetlands. "Most of the wetlands have been removed in a series of flood events that occurred in the wash in the 1970s and 1980s."

James says the treated water that enters the wash is cleaner than water that enters from other sources. Officials estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the yearly flow into the wash comes from treated waste water.

Mulroy and other water officials also embrace Paulson's related priority for the valley -- bigger and better recycling and reuse of waste water.

The frustration for the officials is that the agencies are doing what Paulson and environmentalists are asking for, Mulroy and others say.

"The stabilization of the Las Vegas Wash is occurring right now," says Kim Zikmund, head of the multi-agency team trying to restore the wetlands in the wash. The greatest part of the problem is erosion caused by flooding, she says, something exacerbated as more and more of the valley is paved over, and more man-made diversions channel swift-flowing water into the wash.

The treated waste water released into the wash has a better water quality than floodwater and daily water runoff, which gets contaminated with pollutants as it washes over roads and parking lots, Zikmund says.

Zikmund has already supervised installation of three erosion-control dams in the wash, and another 12 are on the way. Each of the structures can cost between $250,000 and $3 million.

The work should be completed within the next couple of years, she says. All of those involved in the debate agree that the issues of water use, disposal and drainage are complex. Most also agree that it will take time and money to make the changes that environmentalists want to see.

Over the entire debate, the largest issue is sometimes unspoken: The valley has an almost insatiable appetite for water. Water not only fills our bathtubs; it has quite literally allowed the desert to bloom.

With a population that has doubled in the last two decades, the metropolitan area remains the fastest-growing city in the country. About 6,000 people per month are added to the population.

All those people, and their lawns and golf courses, demand water. The water authority and the local water agencies have to bring it to them.

The problem is that the Colorado River, which supplies Lake Mead, is a finite system. There is only so much water to go around, and the Las Vegas area competes with Southern California and other Western states for that water.

The Colorado River Compact, negotiated in the 1920s, limits Nevada to 300,000 acre-feet of water per year -- or to put it in more common terms, nearly 98 billion gallons.

It's a lot, but it isn't enough. The region last year used an estimated 450,000 acre-feet of water. The region is allowed to take more than the basic entitlement because it returned 165,000 acre-feet in treated waste water to Lake Mead, and garnered return flow credits.

Subtracting the return credits from the draw off gives the region a net consumption of about 286,000 acre-feet per year -- which actually gives Nevada a surplus of about 14,000 acre-feet per year.

That slim surplus not only depends on return flow credits, but also leaves little room for growth.

According to the water authority, the region will max out what it can draw out of Lake Mead in 2007. After that, it will have to renegotiate the river compact, reduce the demand through reuse or get more return flow credits.

All three options are being pursued, but it is the return flow credit system that has been the backbone of the region's efforts in past decades.

Paulson calls the region's dependence on return flow credits an addiction.

"The addiction is about a lot more than water," he says. "It's about money ... There are people who are making a ton of money off this stuff."

He calls the return flow credit system "a license to pollute the Colorado River system." His alternative is to aggressively reclaim, recycle and reuse as much water as possible before the water is returned to Lake Mead.

To treat the water for disposal, send it through the wash and into Lake Mead, then draw it back, clean it and chlorinate it for potable use is inefficient, Paulson argues. Instead, he'd like to use it for irrigation and other purposes that don't require the same levels of treatment needed for drinking water.

Mulroy agrees that recycling and reuse of the water is a much more economical alternative to treating water and releasing it back into Lake Mead. Along with the effort to restore the wash, the region's water and sewage treatment agencies are working daily to increase the amount of reuse, Mulroy says.

"Return flow credits used to be the driver," she says. "They aren't anymore."

Paulson and his allies' goals -- increased reuse of waste water and recovery of the wash -- are now the priorities for the region's agencies. Two new waste water treatment plants, one in the northwest and one in the southeast part of the valley, will recycle more of the water for irrigation, Mulroy says.

She says a handful of erosion-control structures already built or under construction in the wash are evidence that the agencies are serious about re-establishing wetlands.

"I'm puzzled as to why he is still flogging this," Mulroy says. "I don't think he believes it will ever come off the paper and become reality."

The water agencies say they can only do so much to recycle and reuse treated water.

"It just doesn't account for enough water," says Doug Karafa, support services manager for the Clark County Sanitation District. His agency estimates that the demand for potable water will grow to 280 million gallons per day by the year 2030. But the potential demand for recycled water -- water which isn't clean enough for drinking but can be used for irrigation, will only grow to 80 million to 100 million gallons per day.

The rest of that has to be disposed of some way, Karafa says, and the most efficient way is to put it back into the lake. That way, he argues, at least it is a closed system.

Not everyone agrees with him. Jane Feldman, conservation committee co-chairwoman of the local Sierra Club group, believes more can be done to reclaim used water and cut usage up front.

"I'd like to see a general awareness that we live in a desert," Feldman says. "I don't see that happening."

Jessica Hodge, urban issues coordinator for Citizen Alert, agrees with Feldman and Paulson.

"Every year the state of the wash gets worse and worse," she says, because of erosion and contamination. The longer agencies take to reverse the problem, "the more development encroaches on that area."

Hodge's organization opposed the $500 million "second straw," which will allow the water authority to more than double the capacity of water drawn from Lake Mead. The 4-mile pipeline and treatment plant should be hooked up to the water system in 2002.

James says he partially agrees with critics of the current water system.

"Right now, the philosophy is to do everything as cheaply as we can," he says. "Maybe we need to rethink that. The public needs to be educated on the benefits of spending the money to improve the environment -- not just the public, but the movers and shakers.

"I think return flow credits are going to be a part of the picture for a considerable period of time," James says. "The political will has to exist. Right now, it's not there."

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