Future of lake may lie in suit

Scott Sonner

Friday, Feb. 9, 2001 | 9:09 a.m.

RENO -- A county's bid to take irrigation water from farmers to help threatened fish in a shrinking desert lake could reverse a century of water law in Nevada and the West, state officials warned Thursday.

Mineral County's lawsuit over Walker Lake, which was to go before the Nevada Supreme Court today, challenges the notion that water rights are forever.

The county wants the state to reallocate the upstream rights -- most of them dating to the 1930s and before -- to allow more Walker River water to complete the trip from its Sierra headwaters near Bridgeport, Calif., to the lake at Hawthorne, about 100 miles southeast of Reno.

"It could have huge impacts on Nevada and it could have huge impacts throughout the West," Michael Turnipseed, Nevada's director of Conservation and Natural Resources, said in a keynote address Thursday at the 55th annual meeting of the Nevada Water Resources Association.

The state is aligned with irrigation districts against the Mineral County suit, the first of its kind in Nevada. The suit not only would prohibit new permits but also eliminate some existing rights.

"The agricultural economy of Smith and Mason Valleys, as well as many Nevada and California communities along the Walker River, depend on their current uses of Walker River water," Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa said in a statement Thursday.

Some of the rights, including those held by tribes, pre-date the federal construction of the irrigation systems in the early 1900s, Turnipseed said.

Traditionally in Nevada, once the state determines a new water right won't interfere with existing rights or harm public resources, the permit is issued "and it is perceived to be a water right forever," he said.

Mineral County wants to change that because of the ecological disaster brewing at the lake that is a recreational fishery and home to the threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout.

Since 1882, Walker Lake has dropped 140 feet and lost 74 percent of its volume, primarily as a result of irrigation upstream. As the lake dries up, its salt content is rising, a trend that ultimately will kill the fish.

"The ecosystem of terminal Walker Lake is close to a crisis situation," Stacy Langsdale, a hydrologist at Nevada's Desert Research Institute, said in a paper presented at the two-day conference.

The lake almost dried up in 1994 after five years of drought, but received a temporary reprieve with five subsequent wet years.

But last year was a dry year "and it looks like we've got another one coming," said Louis Thompson, chairman of the nonprofit Walker Lake Working Group, a co-petitioner with Mineral County.

"Another two years beyond this one without significant water and the fishery will be lost. So we don't have a lot of time," he said.

Opponents include the Walker River Irrigation District and the Walker River Paiute Tribe, which uses river water for reservation farms.

"We're afraid you're going to bankrupt our economy," said Ken Spooner of Yerington, representing the irrigation district.

The tribe, with priority ranking in a 1935 federal decree that allocated the water, believes it already is receiving inadequate amounts of water, said Alice Walker of Boulder, Colo., the tribe's lawyer.

"It's a very large number of interests all claiming the same pot of water," Walker said.

"The tribe is interested in preserving the agricultural way of life it was forced to adopt when it was sent to the reservation," she said.

Thompson said Mineral County wrongly is portrayed as being on the side of the environment and Lyon County on the side of the economy.

"It is an economic issue for Mineral County just as it is for Lyon County and upstream," Thompson said, pointing to the recreational fishery that helps pump money into Hawthorne.

He's skeptical of proposals to buy out existing water rights upstream to allow more water to flow to the lake.

"All of Mineral County's annual budget couldn't buy enough water to raise the lake level one-quarter inch," he said. He recommends more efficient irrigation practices and switching to crops that require less water.

"We're not out to wreck that economy upstream," Thompson said. "We believe both economies can exist under the right conditions."