Mulroy: Teamwork will keep water flowing

Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2002 | 9:04 a.m.

State and regional governments from across the West must do more to cooperate and save water, the head of Southern Nevada's water system said Monday.

Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said populations throughout the West face incredible legal, technical, environmental and supply challenges as populations continue to grow. Meeting those challenges requires that all seven states along the Colorado River cooperate, she said.

The Colorado River is the largest single source of drinking water in the West, providing nearly all of Southern Nevada's water as well as irrigating millions of acres of farmland in California.

"One of us will not survive at the expense of others," Mulroy said Monday to about 1,000 people during a conference of the American Water Works Association, a national trade group of administrators and engineers from public water systems.

Mulroy said the region has begun to coalesce around a common effort to ensure continued access to clean water.

"We've made huge strides," she said. "We've begun over the last 10 years to view ourselves as a region."

The Southern Nevada Water Authority operates the overall system, which delivers water to five public distributors throughout the Las Vegas area and most of Clark County. Mulroy also serves as general manager of the largest of those distributors, the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

Mulroy cited Southern Nevada's deal with Arizona to "bank" water in underground reservoirs as an example of interstate cooperation.

The agreement allows Southern Nevada to store up to 1.2 million acre-feet of water in Arizona from Nevada's surpluses. Nevada's annual allotment from the Colorado River is 300,000 acre-feet.

An acre-foot of water is 326,000 gallons, or about enough water for one family for one year. Although Nevada now comes close to using its annual limit, surpluses could be saved for later years when the state goes over its allotment.

Mulroy was not above chiding California for the overuse of water from the Colorado. California is technically entitled to up to 4.4 million acre-feet of water per year, but regularly exceeds that allotment by up to 800,000 acre-feet.

An agreement under negotiation now would allow California to use surplus river water that would go to other states in return for California's pledge to reduce reliance on the river within 15 years.

The Interior Department and the department's Bureau of Reclamation, which runs Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, are negotiating the agreement. Bob Walsh, a bureau spokesman, said he has seen "a tremendous increase in cooperation" among the seven states along the Colorado during the past six years.

Mulroy said cooperation was the key to avoiding catastrophe in Southern Nevada in the early 1990s. At that time, competition among the various water distributors was threatening the entire water system for the region.

"We went to war with one another," she said, to the point where water districts would throw water away rather than give it to another distributor.

But cooperation -- including the creation of the water authority in 1991 -- has enabled the region to save huge amounts of water and enact regional water-conservation programs that have staved off water shortages, she said.

Mulroy called for interstate cooperation to keep water sources clean.

"We're poisoning ourselves," she said. "It's the largest form of suicide I've ever seen. It's not fish-versus-people. We are a part of that ecosystem."