Thursday, July 10, 2003 | 11:21 a.m.
Officials from water agencies throughout the Southwest and Washington, D.C., came to Las Vegas to hear calls for cooperation, consensus and collaboration in dealing with the region's water crisis.
But what most of those officials attending the U.S. Interior Department-sponsored Water 2025 conference wanted to know was how those principles would apply to Southern Nevada's new proposal to de-link Las Vegas' water future from California's.
Pat Mulroy, Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager, unveiled the detailed proposal at the Wednesday conference. The proposal, which would have to be approved by Interior Secretary Gale Norton in consultation with the states using Colorado River water, would allow Southern Nevada to take up to 60,000 acre-feet a year above its basic allotment of 300,000 acre-feet yearly.
One acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or about enough water for a typical family for one year.
Nevada and California both lost access to the so-called "interim surplus" Jan. 1. The surplus is a legal fiction that allowed the two states to take more than their basic allotments. Nevada last year took an extra 30,000 acre-feet, the most it has ever consumed.
California, however, has taken as much as 800,000 acre-feet above its allotment of 4.2 million acre-feet. It will not take any this year. The Interior Department shut off access to any water above the minimum after California failed to ratify an agreement to wean itself off the surplus water over the next 15 years -- a "soft landing" for water users in the Golden State.
Unfortunately for local water agencies and consumers, Nevada was swept up in the cutoff. Interior officials have said they are sympathetic to the plight of Las Vegas water users, but the law of the river gave them no choice.
Since the cutoff, the California agencies have been in unsuccessful negotiations to bridge the impasse.
For Nevada, the surplus was a critical need that must be reinstated, local officials repeated at every opportunity Wednesday. Not only would it dull the effects of a devastating four-year drought, but it would give much-needed time for the water authority to develop long-range alternative sources to Lake Mead, which supplies nearly 90 percent of local water needs.
"Our water situation is precarious," warned Richard Bunker, chairman of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, the agency charged with negotiating agreements with the federal government. Bunker told about 150 at the conference, most of them professionals in regional water agencies and affected industries, that the surplus is the linchpin of Southern Nevada's long-term resource plan and is "urgently needed" now.
"For seven months we've waited," Mulroy told the crowd. "For seven months Nevada has gone without the interim surplus guidelines through no fault of our own."
The surplus, coupled with water "banking" or storage in the ground, "is our bridge to the future," she said. "We have to have them."
Mulroy pitched the new proposal as painless to the water officials from neighboring states, arguing that taking that water would have no effect on their ability to fully use their own allotments. The principal difference under the water authority proposal, made Wednesday morning to Interior Department officials, is that it would legally separate California and Nevada so the Silver State could continue to use the surplus.
"It does not constitute any sort of a threat," Mulroy said. "It has no adverse impact on any of our neighbors. We don't want to be a burden on any of the other states."
Mulroy, Bunker and other Southern Nevada officials pointed out that 60,000 acre-feet is a very small fraction of what the other states receive as basic allotments. Nevada's allotment is the smallest, at 300,000 acre-feet a year.
But allowing the extra water would save Southern Nevada from potential disaster, Mulroy argued.
"Nevada has to have some independence. We have to have some surety," she said. "We have to be the master of our own fate."
Officials from Interior and neighboring states were cautious about the new proposal, which water authority staffers faxed to their colleagues at the six other basin states of the Colorado River Wednesday.
"We're taking it under consideration," said Thomas Carr, chief of Colorado River management for the Arizona Department of Water Resources. "We have to consult with our water agencies before we make any response."
He said a potential deal-killer would be if the Nevada proposal would require Arizona to waive rights to seek its own portion of the surplus, a right it has not yet exercised but hopes to in the future. Water officials from Southern Nevada said it would not threaten Arizona's use of any surplus.
Dennis Underwood, vice president of the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, was cautiously supportive of the Nevada proposal.
"We're supportive of states having control of their own destiny," Underwood said. "We will try to be as accommodating to Nevada as we can."
Underwood's agency is one of the four California agencies that has not been able to settle the issue of how Colorado River water would be divided there, the impasse that led to the loss of the surplus for both states.
Interior Assistant Secretary Bennett Raley echoed Underwood. Although Raley's boss, Secretary Norton, is the ultimate rivermaster, Bennett made it clear that the states of the Colorado River would have a significant voice in the ultimate decision.
"We're looking at it (the proposal) with great interest and we're anxious to work with Nevada and the other states," Raley said. "We're treating this proposal very seriously."
"We recognize the equity issues" in treating both California and Nevada with the same brush, he added.
Raley would not say what Interior would do if California or another state rejected the Nevada proposal.
"I hope that we don't have to reach that issue," he said.
Mulroy and the staff of the water authority have laid out an aggressive timetable for acceptance of the proposal which would reopen Nevada's share of the surplus by October. Mulroy said staff would begin meeting with their counterparts in other states immediately.
Raley said he could not say when his agency would okay the proposal, if it does approve the plan. But he promised to work as expeditiously as possible.
"We don't want to dally."
Nevada water officials say their proposal -- and plan execution -- is exactly in the spirit of Interior new approach to western water issues. The conference, subtitled "Preventing Crises and Conflict in the West," emphasized cooperative, regional responses to water problems, what the local officials say is the focus of the Nevada proposal.
"We all must join together so we the citizens of the Colorado River can make the best, effective use of that river," Raley said at the conference. "It's clear that if we don't do something now, we will have problems to deal with."
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