LV hosts key water meetings

Monday, Dec. 13, 2004 | 10:52 a.m.

Las Vegas will host three discussions on water issues this week that could signal -- even dictate -- how Southern Nevada and the West respond to years of drought.

Two of the discussions will focus on the emerging political and legal fights over the diminishing amount of water available from the Colorado River, the Southwest's most important single source of water. A host of conflicts will be targeted in the discussions: urban versus agricultural needs; upper basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico versus the lower basin trio of Nevada, Arizona and California; and even the priority within the lower basin, which puts California's needs over Arizona and Nevada's.

The first meeting, scheduled for today and Tuesday, is a conference on the present and future of desalination, the process of removing salt from water to make it suitable for drinking or other uses. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., is the featured speaker at the conference today.

While much of the desalination discussion will focus on the difficult technical issues involved in the technology, it is important to Southern Nevada because the long-term resource plan for the region includes building or contributing to desalinization plants on the Pacific Ocean.

While that may be decades down the road, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is looking to highly saline surface and groundwater resources that need to be treated to augment its supply from Lake Mead within the next 10 years.

The second conference, scheduled for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, is the annual meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association, a gathering of water agency officials from the seven basin states of the Colorado River.

The focus of the river water users group will be on the legal and technical issues involved in the drought and on sharing what is an increasingly scarce resource. Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy is scheduled to speak on the issue of whether the legal interstate structure guiding river use can survive the drought.

That focus will continue Friday, when a working group of the seven basin states meets in an ongoing effort to hammer out the critical issue of which states and which users will be hit if the federal Department of Interior is forced to impose "shortage criteria," that is, if the water level in Lake Mead continues to drop.

The issues for the states are potentially huge. The Department of Interior, which by law is the river master for the Colorado, has never imposed shortage criteria and has no legal guide as to when cuts would come. As for which state and users get hit first, Arizona is the lowest priority state among the three lower basin states, behind California and Nevada.

Arizona also uses much of its 2.8 million acre-feet of annual allotment for agriculture, and California's in-state prioritization puts agricultural uses at the top of the list for its 4.4 million acre-feet.

Nevada, which gets 300,000 acre-feet annually, all of it for urban use, wants to ensure that human, metropolitan needs come first.

Adding to the potential political and legal difficulties in drawing up a plan for shortages is the fact that the upper basin states, by law, have to deliver 75 million acre-feet of water, a total of more than 24 trillion gallons, even if reservoirs in the Rocky Mountains go dry. The prospect is anathema to the upper basin communities dependent on those reservoirs.

Some observers have predicted a legal and political battle if the river conditions get to that stage. In such a conflict, Nevada would almost certainly have to be one of the soldiers.

Kurt Segler, Henderson utilities director and president of the Colorado River Water Users Association, said the upcoming talks will be an opportunity to confront serious unresolved issues.

The meeting, he said, "facilitates the conversations the seven basin states should have been having all along."

The lack of progress so far on the issue of shortages and who gets hit is due to the fact that with such an important issue, "no one wants to do anything rash. It's their water. It's their lives."

"In the history of the Colorado River, a lot of talking gets done," Segler noted. "It's seven states, for heaven's sakes. Plus the federal government."

He said people should not expect a dramatic breakthrough, but "every time we meet, we're one step closer."

Vince Alberta, Southern Nevada Water Authority spokesman, said the technical discussions on the shortage issue have been going on throughout the last year.

"They will continue the discussions on how they should operate the river during this drought, including upper and lower basin dynamics, such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead," Alberta said. He said the river watchers should not expect an immediate solution to the questions surrounding the talks.

"They will continue those discussion through late spring because they want to get a full assessment of what the snow pack looks like this water year," he said.

The water year runs October through April, when winter storms drop nearly all of the precipitation that the Rocky Mountains, source of the Colorado River, receives in the year.

If the states cannot reach a consensus and the drought deepens, the Interior Department could impose its own decisions on where the cuts will come. It is not a prospect that appeals to the departmental brass.

John Keys, commissioner of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, would be one of those who would have to impose any solution. His agency runs the dams controlling water flow through the Colorado River and to those agencies supplying cities and farms throughout the West.

"We have not received any plan from the states yet," Keys said. "The secretary (Interior Secretary Gale Norton) is still waiting for them to put together a proposal. We're waiting to hear from the states. We have to do that in 2005.

"If in the end something is not done, the secretary may have to impose her own answers to these questions."

Keys, who is scheduled to speak Friday morning at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting, said the drought will be on the minds of everybody at the conference.

"The drought is overarching in everything we're doing right now," he said. Still, his agency is looking at the prospect of water shortages in the West even if the drought breaks. Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation are working with state and local agencies to develop strategies to respond to growing needs propelled by growing populations.

"We're trying to look past the drought."