Editorial: Neighbors’ bickering spills over

Friday, Jan. 3, 2003 | 9:39 a.m.

On Tuesday Southern California water officials missed a year-end deadline to reach an agreement to reduce their region's water consumption. It was an impasse caused by the Imperial Irrigation District's refusal to significantly conserve water for agricultural uses. The failure means that the Interior Department will make good on its threat to prevent Southern California and Southern Nevada from using surplus Colorado River water. Under the Law of the River, all seven states that draw from the Colorado River must be treated the same, and since Nevada and California are both receiving surplus river water, the law is being interpreted that both will have to forgo the extra water. The decision by the Interior Department, which is worried about a continued drought's impact on the Colorado River, will result in Southern Nevada losing 11 percent of what we curren tly receive from that source.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority does have underground reserves it can tap into for an emergency, but eventually stricter water conservation measures than we already employ here likely will have to be implemented. And while we can understand having to reduce water considerably due to natural disasters, such as the drought conditions we're now experiencing, the reality is that if Imperial Irrigation District officials had just agreed to be less wasteful, there wouldn't be a need to curtail our use of water by such a large amount. That's what makes this particular situation difficult to swallow -- this is actually a man-made disaster caused by the obstinacy of a single water district.

Southern Nevadans should prepare for the worst because of the difficulty in overcoming the legal issues that require Nevada to be treated the same as California. Still, two weeks ago Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton indicated she's sympathetic to concerns that it is unfair that Southern Nevada should be forced to cut back on water use when it had nothing to do with the dispute among Southern California water officials. We hope that Norton somehow can find a way to sever Nevada from an intra-California dispute; it's wrong that we should be punished, too.