Water for new town flows to lobbyist

Friday, July 15, 2005 | 9:24 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 16-17, 2005

While everybody else is jockeying and elbowing over precious water rights in rural Nevada, political lobbyist and powerbroker Harvey Whittemore is floating in them.

Whittemore, who in 1998 announced plans to build a 50,000-home development in a rural area 60 miles north of Las Vegas -- a whole new city from scratch -- now says he has secured rights to enough water to go forward.

The amount of water, he said, is in excess of 40,000 acre-feet. That should satisfy most, if not all, of the water needs for his plans, which include, besides the 50,000 homes, as many as 10 golf courses on a 43,000-acre site, which straddles the Lincoln-Clark County line.

The size of his water rights in a county of about 4,500 people is substantial by any measure. Clark County, home to about 1.8 million people, uses 300,000 acre-feet annually from the Colorado River.

Whittemore has been able to put together the rights without the contention seen in other parts of the state.

In White Pine County to the north, for instance, county commissioners and residents are fighting a plan by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to pipe water 250 miles south to Las Vegas. The Legislature helped in this effort by approving a $1 million fund to help rural counties study and protect their water resources.

In Lincoln County the climate is different, and Whittemore has been able to work with the county and others to put his water portfolio together without much dissent.

Lincoln County commissioners have partnered with the private Vidler Water Co. to develop a plan to sell agricultural water for urban uses. The Lincoln-Vidler partnership has forged an agreement with the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Clark County to share the county's ground water. Vidler has formed a partnership with Whittemore to sell him more water for Coyote Springs. And Whittemore will likely have to use planned water authority pipelines to get his water from the far reaches of Lincoln County to Coyote Springs, observers say.

Louis Benezet, a Pioche resident and occasional critic of Lincoln County government, said the intimate relationship between the county commission, Vidler and now Vidler's partnership with Whittemore, are not healthy for the county.

He said Whittemore has applications for water that would come from Geyser Ranch, at the northern extreme of Lincoln County -- but how much is unclear. Benezet fears the impact that switching the use from agricultural to municipal to build Coyote Springs would have on the area.

"Geyser Ranch -- that's one of the prime ranching areas of Lincoln County. It's one of the most beautiful areas of Lincoln County as well," he said.

Whittemore declined to say precisely how much water Coyote Springs Investments, the company he controls that is guiding the development with builder-partner Pardee Homes, controls or will ultimately need.

"These are private transactions," he said, adding that the company has "secured sufficient water rights for the long-term development of the project."

Some environmentalists believe that Whittemore is going into the water business, with plans to sell to Las Vegas. He denies that.

"We've made it very clear that all the water we're acquiring is going to be used for the Coyote Springs project," he said.

Looking at all of the deals, Benezet said he doesn't believe that the water from Lincoln County will ultimately be used to benefit Lincoln County -- or even Coyote Springs, which includes property in both Lincoln and Clark counties. He noted that one of Whittemore's early actions in the seven-year history of development of the Coyote Springs project was to sell 9,000 acre-feet of groundwater to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Benezet said between Vidler, Lincoln County government, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and Whittemore, the environment and ranches of Lincoln County will have little left to share.

"How much water is going to go to Coyote Springs when you're done with it?" Benezet asked. "You've got the water in the pipeline going south. It stops going south when it's paid for ... That's their business, you know. The picture was not as clear when they first showed up in Lincoln County. But now we have a pretty good idea."

Benezet said that arguing, as Whittemore is, that a transfer from agricultural use to municipal use means no net loss of water for a community is deceptive because it ignores the fact that "recharge" water, or water that is used and soaks back into the local soil and aquifer, will be lost.

JoAnne Garrett, an executive board member of Citizen Alert, a statewide progressive policy group, has been a critic of the water authority and other groups that have sought to transfer rural water to Las Vegas.

"It's the vultures," she said. "They are gathering, competing and making deals with one another. It's the privatization of water. It's unconscionable."

Garrett is concerned that the various efforts to suck water out of the ground will have a multiplying effect on the environment.

"It's one aquifer," she said. "It's that deep carbonate aquifer that they are going after."

She noted that geologists and hydrologists disagree on how much water can be taken from the region without impacting existing users, including natural springs.

"So there will be a lot of irreparable damage," Garrett said. "They will be spreading it around, but when they are pulling it out of Lincoln County, they are pulling it out of the same aquifer."

Despite the critics, Whittemore said he is confident that he can win the approval of the Nevada State Engineer, which he needs to transfer the water to Coyote Springs. Hearings are likely to come this year on the proposed transfers.

"The issue in Nevada is really straightforward. We own senior water rights," Whittemore said. "We've already made a commitment that we are very concerned that what we are doing is in an appropriate and environmentally sensitive way. We are very, very comfortable in the process we have set out to protect the water rights in the region."

But the approval process still has invited some protests, including one from Lincoln County, Whittemore's partner, which has also joined protests against the developer's proposal for Geyser Ranch.

"We have filed protests against the water diversion," Lincoln County Commissioner Tommy Rowe said. "We are backing his development in Coyote Springs 100 percent, and we have provided a lot of water for him."

The problem is that Whittemore is looking for water from the most northern parts of Lincoln County, Rowe said.

"We feel that we can furnish him water closer without bothering any of the farmland up there," he said.

Lincoln County Commissioner Hal Keaton, on the other hand, said he doesn't take issue with Whittemore's plans. He noted that the proposed water transfers affect private property.

"I don't have any problem with it," Keaton said. "It's really a long-range thing."

Keaton said winning approval from the state for the water transfers is one thing. Bringing the water from northern Lincoln County is potentially more complicated, and could require the use of pipelines the Southern Nevada Water Authority has already planned as part of the agency's own effort to develop rural water supplies.

"He couldn't transmit it without the pipeline that the Southern Nevada Water Authority wants to build up to Spring Valley (in southern White Pine and northern Lincoln counties) anyway," Keaton said. "It's private. It doesn't seem to jeopardize anything that's going on at this point, so I really don't have a problem with it."

Southern Nevada Water Authority spokesman Vince Alberta said his agency has an agreement to potentially share pipelines with Lincoln County, but does not have such an agreement with Whittemore. The water authority hopes to win approval from the State Engineer to take 48,000 to 62,000 acre-feet annually from Lincoln County.

Under state law, Whittemore has to overcome similar obstacles to transfer water as he would to develop new water sources. Among the criteria: there has to be water at the source, the use cannot affect existing rights and the use "cannot be detrimental to the public interest," said Deputy State Engineer Tracy Taylor.

Taylor said Whittemore has applications to change 56 existing uses and places and applications for 13 new well sites.

Benezet said that number is expected to grow because Whittemore has continued to request new wells.

Jane Feldman, a Sierra Club activist from Las Vegas, noted that while environmentalists are troubled by the wholesale use of water for ranching in parts of the Silver State, the Coyote Springs project has long been a concern.

"All the species we see in the desert are concentrated around the water areas," she said. "I think perhaps alfalfa is probably not the best use of desert water, but probably having 100,000 (people) in the middle of the desert is not the best use of water, either."

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