LV takes next step in tapping small rivers

Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2004 | 10:48 a.m.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority on Monday formally filed an application with the Bureau of Land Management to gain rights for pipelines to divert water from small rivers in northeastern Clark County, the latest move in an effort to bring rural water to the urban area.

The application for permanent rights-of-way would allow the authority to construct and operate facilities for the water the agency already has the right to use.

A Las Vegas environmentalist fighting the Water Authority effort to find and exploit rural water sources said the application was premature and potentially threatened endangered species of fish in the Virgin and Muddy rivers.

The state engineer in 1994 granted the Water Authority the right to take up to 190,000 acre-feet a year and an annual average of 113,000 from the Virgin River, which flows through Mesquite to Lake Mead.

The Water Authority also has a deal in place with the Muddy Valley Irrigation District, which serves rural parts of the northeast county, to take 7,000 acre-feet annually from the Muddy River, with an option to buy 2,500 acre-feet more, said Vince Alberta, Water Authority spokesman.

An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or about enough water to serve one and a half typical households for a year, according to Water Authority estimates.

Over the next decade, in a schedule that agency officials have accelerated in response to the drought, the authority hopes to double the 300,000 acre-feet now available from Lake Mead with water supplies from rural parts of the state.

"We've had this in our plan for a number of years, and now we are moving forward to implement it," Alberta said.

The request to the BLM will require a full environmental impact statement, a process of public meetings and analysis that generally takes at least two years to complete.

The request includes about 80 miles of pipelines, pumping stations, storage reservoirs, treatment facilities, access roads and power transmission lines to run the system -- a total of approximately 3,860 acres across Clark County.

"It's technologically possible," Alberta said. "What has to be worked out is what are the costs and what is the potential harm to the environment, and that's what's going to be evaluated as part of this process."

Jane Feldman, an activist with the local arm of the Sierra Club, said the Water Authority is going after too much, too fast.

"It seems like we're on this fast train pulling water from all sorts of different places," she said. "It's not just Las Vegas that is dealing with the drought. All of us have a drought."

Feldman, a member of Clark County's Growth Management Task Force, said the Water Authority is moving on rural water without anyone considering the limits to the Mojave Desert's ability to sustain ever-larger human populations.

"We haven't talked about how many people the desert can hold, and we have just got to do the hard work on that... We are building ourselves a huge problem here."

She said rare and endangered species of fish, among them the Moapa dace, could prompt the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to block development of the plan to divert water from the rivers.

Clark County Commissioner Rory Reid, a Water Authority board member, said as the community and water users along the Colorado River deal with the ongoing impacts of five years of drought and growing demand for water, consumers in Las Vegas have to look for new sources.

He emphasized that the application with the BLM does not mean that the Water Authority definitely plans to bring water down from the Virgin and Muddy rivers.

When it comes time to make that decision, one of the factors the agency will have to look at is cost. A Water Authority estimate placed a potential cost for the pipelines, pumping stations and water treatment facilities for the river-water diversion at $1 billion or more.