Power plant request may lead to battle over water

Tuesday, July 18, 2000 | 11:10 a.m.

A battle is brewing in a desert valley 40 miles northeast of Las Vegas over water claimed by the Moapa Valley band of Paiute Indians, the Las Vegas Valley Water District and Nevada Power Co.

The Paiutes have asked the state for 7,000 acre-feet of ground water under the Moapa Valley Indian reservation to operate a proposed natural gas-fired power plant that could produce $200 million worth of electricity over 35 years.

The Las Vegas Valley Water District Board is expected to formally protest the Paiute request today. The water district claims it would hurt future water supplies to growing Southern Nevada cities, water district spokesman Vince Alberta said.

The water district filed for ground water rights in Moapa Valley in 1989, as did Nevada Power Co.

But Seattle attorney Steve Chestnut, who has represented the Paiutes for 15 years, said the Indians have had a claim on both surface and ground water rights since the federal government in 1980 gave them 70,000 acres of land in the Moapa Valley.

The Paiutes also claim ancient rights on the area's water, called aboriginal rights, Chestnut said. The Indians have lived in Southern Nevada's valleys for thousands of years, he explained.

"Absent ground water for this project, they have no water," Chestnut said.

The Paiutes are looking to the power plant as an economic boost to support the 300-member community along the Virgin River. The Paiutes will share profits from the power plant with Calpine Corp., the San Jose, Calif., company proposing to build the plant.

"They have a community, they are responsible to the community to bring some benefits to it," Chestnut said. "It's the center of their culture."

Electricity from the plant could power Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles, he said.

Michael Turnipseed, incoming director of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said no one knows how much ground water is available in the basin, home to the Moapa Dace fish, an endangered species. The amount of water requested by the Paiutes could serve 28,000 people.

Only a few hundred acre-feet of water fall on the Moapa area each year from rain, Turnipseed said. What is in the old, deep carbonate aquifer remains a mystery. "We don't know the contribution from the carbonate water and never have," he said.

In California, Calpine has run into some opposition to its plan to build a new power plant south of San Jose.

The company promised a state-of-the-art project that would produce clean, reliable power, but state and federal regulators are concerned that the proposed plant will dump tons of pollutants into the California air. Those pollutants could be removed with more modern technology, officials say.

Calpine's proposed Metcalf Energy Center has been upgraded once, but officials believe it still will emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide.

Environmental Protection Agency officials, as well as the California Energy Commission and the California Air Resources Board, have called on lower pollution emissions from Calpine, especially carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds.

With the proposed Moapa Valley plant so close to Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada pollution officials said they will take a close look at emissions from any plant Calpine builds. The coal-fired Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, southeast of Las Vegas, is under pressure to lower pollution that drifts into the Grand Canyon and creates haze.

Neither the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection nor the Clark County Health District has received a pollution control application from Calpine to build the Moapa plant. Chestnut said no application has been submitted, and the Paiutes will direct it to the federal EPA in San Francisco.

"It's an Indian reservation," he said. "The state and county do not have jurisdiction there."