Water talks on tap

Monday, Dec. 12, 2005 | 8:18 a.m.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is scheduled to speak at a meeting of Colorado River water users in Las Vegas next week, capping three days of potentially tough interstate discussions on managing the river's resource.

The issues to be discussed are dividing the four states of the upper Colorado River basin from the three lower basin states. But Nevada, California and Arizona, the three lower basin states, have their own disagreements.

Hanging over next week's meetings and the overall debate is a federal deadline to come up with a way to manage feared shortages of water on the river because of drought.

Officials in Nevada and Washington said Norton -- the manager of the critical river system for more than 20 million people in the Southwest -- plans to speak Dec. 16.

Listening closely to Norton will be a host of state representatives, water-agency managers, tribal leaders, environmentalists, private sector contractors and others with an interest in the region's water future.

Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said that while the meeting of the Colorado River Water Users Association will last three days beginning Wednesday, a meeting of the basin states concurrent with the first day would be more important. The main topic at that session will be how to share the impact of shortages.

"We are under a deadline with Interior," she said. "By next spring, we need a conceptual outline, so we have a lot of work to do. We're still working to get the Nevada pieces in place."

Southern Nevada gets 90 percent of its drinking water from the drought-stricken Colorado River, through the lower-basin reservoir of Lake Mead. The Water Authority wants support for its plan to bring groundwater into the Las Vegas system, and put the used, treated groundwater into Lake Mead for a "credit" for a similar amount to go back to the urban area.

It also is seeking other states' support to take water from Lake Mead that comes in from the tributaries of the Muddy and Virgin rivers in Nevada.

Other states have their own concerns. Arizona, for example, is the junior partner among the three lower basin states and, under the river law now in place, could feel cuts first.

And the upper basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming could see their users hit hard if the lower basin states issued a "compact call" for a minimum release if drought continues to affect the river system.

Mulroy and others fear that a failure to resolve the divisions among the states could lead to legal warfare, a scenario that she said would make it impossible to respond to immediate water needs among the many users along the river.

"These are very fragile and difficult times," she said. "It is fair to say that keeping us all at the table is one of the more difficult tasks. It wouldn't take much to flip us away from the table and into court.

"The institution of a court is not built to react to water needs."

Bob Johnson, regional director of the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation, said Norton would like to have recommendations from the states by the end of January on how to handle shortages -- a goal that, he acknowledged, may not be realized.

He said that with or without the recommendations, Norton would make decisions on how to handle cuts to the river resource.

"Realistically, we have to operate the river, with or without the consensus," Johnson said. "That really drives them (the basin states) to sit down and work together."

Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, oversees an area that supplies 65 percent of the water that goes into the river system. Like other managers, he says people should not expect sudden resolution of the divisions next week.

"The states are making slow progress toward some sort of understanding on how to develop shortage criteria for the basin," Kuhn said. "Like anything with water, it's one step forward, two steps back."

While the upper basin states are concerned that a "compact call" for guaranteed delivery to the lower basin could force cutbacks upstream, Kuhn said such a move would instead guarantee a protracted legal war.

"The legal issues that would have to be resolved before one drop of water was curtailed are immense and would take -- literally take -- decades to resolve," he said.

Jeff Kightlinger, general counsel for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, noted that the stakes for the millions in his region and throughout the West could not be higher.

"We've never had to deal with the hard issues," he said. "We've been arguing all these issues such as how to share a surplus on the river. Now we're arguing how to share the pain, which is a much tougher argument."

Mulroy echoed the comments of many of her colleagues from other basin states who said that they have collectively, if haltingly, made progress over the last year of talks.

"We're further away from court now," she said. "We've gotten a lot of the positioning behind us. I think all of us recognize that any solution that doesn't create some massive losers is one that we are going to fashion together.

"I think we've all put our megaphones aside."

Launce Rake can be reached at 259-4127 or at lrake@lasvegassun.com.