Columnist Susan Snyder: Working out water rights the fair way

Monday, April 28, 2003 | 8:17 a.m.

I am always amazed by people who can maneuver a tractor as if it were an MG Triumph.

The man driving a huge John Deere on an alfalfa field on the Moapa Paiute Band Indian Reservation plowed perfectly straight diagonal channels, backing to the start of each row with seeming ease. He climbed down from his cab to talk and hadn't even broken a sweat.

He declined to give his name but said he was building up the borders of the field to increase irrigation efficiency. The tribe cultivates 247 acres. Their water needs to be there.

Water for the tribe seemed absent from discussion in the Nevada Assembly's passage of a bill that eased environmental obstacles for a plan to build a 42,000-acre golf course community on the Lincoln-Clark county border a few miles up Muddy River.

But Coyote Springs water is on the minds of many, including the Moapa Indians, who irrigate solely from the Muddy River.

"I think people are talking about it," the tractor driver said. "If you drop the water level, there will be less water."

He climbed back into the cab, likely unaware that in one sentence he summed up the controversy that has, and will always, divide the West.

"Groundwater is a zero sum gain. If you take it from one place, you're taking it from somewhere else," said John Hiatt, Red Rock Audubon Society chairman and Las Vegas conservationist. "Something will happen miles away. Springs will dry up."

Rivers too. Coyote Springs developer Harvey Whittemore has acquired 6,100 acre-feet of water rights, but needs 10,000 more. An acre-foot of water, or 326,000 gallons, sustains a family of four for a year or waters an acre of land a foot deep.

All of the Muddy River's surface rights are committed. Pumping groundwater is Coyote Springs' only option. Hiatt fears it isn't a good one. Groundwater starts as surface water. Indirectly siphoning from the Muddy River through pumping could endanger rights-holders downriver.

"Water rights are useless unless you have water," Hiatt said.

Phil Swain, Moapa Paiute Band tribal chairman, said his experts are looking into Coyote Springs' possible effects.

"They've never ascertained how it would affect us down here," Swain said. "We're downstream from that. For them to plan something that large -- it's huge -- well, I don't know where they'll get the water rights from."

That's always the question mark, whether we're talking about golf courses in the desert, pirate ships on the Strip or houses in Red Rock Canyon.

"There's a lot of enthusiasm for living in a desert oasis but not a lot of enthusiasm for living out in the bare desert," Hiatt said. "We are the driest state in the nation. People forget that, but it defines our lives."

Swain is familiar with the definitions supplied by those who settled the West. The Moapa reservation was created on 2 million acres in 1873 and reduced to 1,000 acres in 1875. It later was increased to its current 71,954 acres.

The first shovel of dirt hasn't been turned, but Coyote Springs already has a lot of neighbors.

"It seems to be a little lopsided in the way they deal with us and the way they deal with the outside world," Swain said.