Water panel split on rate of growth

Tuesday, March 29, 2005 | 10:59 a.m.

Deep divisions over policy continue to roil an advisory committee charged with finding new sources of water to satisfy the region's continued growth.

Members of the Integrated Water Planning Advisory Committee, which has been meeting since August to draft recommendations on how to develop more water for the urban area, and staff of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that created the committee, had sharply different perspectives on key issues at their meeting Monday night.

One issue is the projected population growth for Clark County and the rural counties where the agency hopes to tap groundwater wells to satisfy Las Vegas' future water needs.

The authority staff members, based on a Nevada state demographer's projections, estimated 3.1 million people in Clark County in 2035. Committee member and Las Vegas conservationist John Hiatt said those projections proposed an annual growth rate of just 2 percent in the coming decades, while the growth rate of late has been around 6 percent.

He noted that the authority also estimates a growth of only about 1,000 people in Lincoln County, where much of the rural groundwater would, in theory, come from, over the next two decades. Lincoln County has a population of only about 4,000 now, but housing developments proposed for the southern part of the county, which is just north of Clark County, could add tens of thousands of new residents in the coming decades.

"These numbers are way wide of the mark and almost embarrassingly so," Hiatt said. "They just don't make any sense."

Hiatt said the danger in getting the population numbers wrong is that the planning efforts by the water authority could also fall far from the mark.

Ken Albright, water authority resource director, said the numbers were the best the agency had from state and local sources but could be modified as more information came in. He said that additional population growth would mean the water resources would have to be tapped sooner rather than later, but the basic questions of where the water would come from still would have to be answered.

The group members disagreed with each other when it came to a discussion over what sources should or could be tapped for the future. The discussion did not rule out any sources.

Water authority staff members said the group needs to figure a deficit of 320,000 acre-feet of water for Southern Nevada by 2035. The committee is still far from consensus on how to satisfy that need.

Some members, such as Dean Baker, a rancher from White Pine County about 200 miles north of Las Vegas, argued that the plans to import to the urban valley rural groundwater -- the biggest element in the proposed portfolio of new water sources -- would be expensive and ultimately unreliable.

But Richard Bunker, chairman of the Colorado River Commission, a sister agency to the water authority, said Southern Nevada has no choice but to plumb the rural areas.

Unless water can be found in the rural areas to satisfy Las Vegas' growing need, he said, the only other option would be to "open up the (Colorado River) compact" in negotiations with the other six states along the river, the source now of 90 percent of Southern Nevada's water supply.

Hiatt, a skeptic when it comes to going after the rural water, said the group at least had to include the possibility of using the sources for its planning purposes.

Nevada environmentalists, the husband and wife team of Dennis Ghiglieri and Rose Strickland of Reno, traveled to Las Vegas to attend the water advisory meeting and argued against tapping the rural water sources.

"The groundwater exportation that you are considering is of great concern to all of Nevada, not just rural Nevada," Strickland said. She warned that the costs, estimated at about $1 billion for tapping wells and bringing water hundreds of miles to Southern Nevada, were not just financial, but could be social, economic and environmental as well.

Glen Hardy, a representative of the Moapa Valley Water District in rural Clark County, said the issues should not stop the group and the water authority from making difficult decisions.

"The worst thing we can do now is nothing," Hardy said. "We have to do something."