Water plan would avoid pipeline

Suzanne Struglinski, Launce Rake and Ed Koch

Thursday, March 4, 2004 | 11:19 a.m.

The Interior Department is looking at a proposal to allow the Southern Nevada Water Authority to draw extra water out of Lake Mead based on the authority's rights to water from the Virgin and Muddy rivers.

The idea, first proposed about a decade ago, was being re-examined in advance of a meeting Friday of water officials from states that make up the Colorado River Basin.

It would allow the Southern Nevada Water Authority to pull 113,000 to 190,000 acre-feet a year based on rights it acquired in 1994 for water from the Virgin and Muddy rivers, which flow into Lake Mead.

The idea, if it were accepted by not only the federal government but also other states dependent on the Colorado River, would save the water authority the cost -- estimated at $1 billion -- of building a pipeline to transport water from the rivers to the Las Vegas Valley, said water authority spokesman Vince Alberta.

Bennett Raley, Interior Department assistant secretary for water and science, said informal discussions between Nevada and the Interior Department have brought up the issue again.

He said the idea has been around for the last decade, and he expects the issue to be discussed at Friday's meeting.

"People are always talking about a variety of things ... but the issue has been raised again by Nevada," Raley said. "It's important to understand that there are discussions on the river almost every week. We have people who think about this every single day."

Raley said this has been no formal request by the state to re-examine the issue and "there is not an imminent action" pending on the matter.

"It's not like we have a formal letter from Nevada saying we want an answer on this," Raley said.

Raley said the officials from the basin states will also discuss drought criteria and other issues at Friday's meeting.

At the heart of the issue, said Chris Chairsell, associate vice chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada and an expert on Colorado River law, is that Las Vegas has rights to the Virgin River water until it hits Lake Mead.

It would be a lot more economical, she said, to measure the water from the Virgin River and Muddy River tributaries and then just pump it from Lake Mead to Las Vegas.

While this proposal would seem like common sense, there is a long history of controversy about such proposals. States have been allowed to draw water from most tributaries to the Colorado River, but once the water spills into the river or into Lake Mead the water is covered under the Colorado River Compact, which regulates water use in the basin.

Drawing water out of the river system is regulated and changes to the way that water is used have been hotly debated.

Raley said during the past two years a lot of attention has been focused on California's water problems, but Interior Secretary Gale Norton signed an agreement in October setting consumption limits, so now attention can be shifted to other areas.

Officials with Southern California's water agency, the Metropolitan Water District, said the law of the river does not allow such "wheeling" of water through the Colorado or Lake Mead. The agency has rights to 4 million acre-feet from Lake Mead, more than 10 times Las Vegas' apportionment.

Dennis Underwood, Metropolitan Water District vice president, cited a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that says that tributaries are fair game, but once the water hits the "main stem," any recovery counts against the state's annual apportionment of water.

"I don't mind people going back and taking a look at it, but I think they will reach the same conclusions," he said of the Supreme Court decision. "You've got to work with what you got and try to make it work."

Kay Brothers, Southern Nevada Water Authority deputy general manager, said the discussion on wheeling the water rights to the Virgin and Muddy rivers is the same now as it was a decade ago. The same legal and physical limitations are in play, she said.

The conversation has come from Washington, she said.

"I think you have federal agencies talking to each other on this," Brothers said. "This has mainly been Bennett's conversation."

She said that even if it is legally possible to take the water from Lake Mead, the capacity of the two intakes that Southern Nevada uses to bring water from the lake might not be able to handle another 190,000 acre-feet.

"There's a lot of things that need to be looked at," Brothers said. "Do we have the capacity to actually do that? I'm not sure that we do."

Chairsell said resurrection of a controversial plan to siphon water that comes from the Virgin River directly from Lake Mead may be out of necessity.

"Times change and circumstances change," she said. "Plans sometimes rise up and go away and then resurface when circumstances become dire.

"Certainly circumstances present themselves now that make them (water officials) say maybe it is time to revisit this. Certainly the Secretary of the Interior cannot overlook the needs of one million-plus people in Las Vegas."

Chairsell said water allocations originally were determined based on farming needs. Today, with farming only a small part of the picture, the need now is to address the needs of people living in large cities.

However, Chairsell said she "certainly can understand why California and Arizona would oppose that." She noted that Southern Nevada is allocated just 300,000 acre feet a year from the Colorado River Commission, while California gets 4.4 million acre feet and Arizona gets 2.8 million acre feet.

The resurrection of the plan, she said, is a sign that negotiations are readying over the issue and "the parties are jockeying for position."

Alberta said "There would have to be a comfort level for all parties involved."