Thursday, Oct. 13, 2005 | 8:14 a.m.
Hal Rothman, a history professor at UNLV, is a columnist for the Las Vegas Sun.
Editor's note: Thursday's column on water is the fifth in an eight-part series on the consequences of growth in the Las Vegas Valley.
The greatest canard about the valley is that we don't deserve the water we use, and we will run out of it because we're wasteful.
We're in a desert and we're profligate, critics say, the most recent of them being The High Country News' Matt Jenkins. We waste water on fountains and other inefficient uses, defying our environment. We don't deserve the resource, they say.
They're dead wrong.
The Las Vegas Strip is the most economically efficient use of water in Nevada. It generates more money and more tax revenue per gallon than any other use of water in the state and maybe even the nation.
The share of water for all nonagricultural uses in Nevada is infinitesimally small when compared with agricultural use. The economic productivity of water use in Nevada is in direct opposition to the amount used.
The activities that use the least water are the most economically productive; the ones that use the most water are inefficient and anachronistic. I'll have to visit rural Nevada under an assumed name after writing this, but it's true.
In Nevada, as in every other Western state, 80 percent of the water goes to agriculture and ranching and 20 percent to all other uses.
In no state, not even California with its vaunted agricultural industry, does agriculture generate even 1 percent of the state's gross domestic product. In Nevada, the gross handle of all other activities is more than 300 times what agriculture and ranching generate.
The world of water has changed of late and the Southern Nevada Water Authority gets a good portion of the credit.
SNWA reinvented water in the Southwest, taking us from a nastily competitive situation, the famed "whiskey's for drinkin', water's for fightin' " of legend and providing a cooperative model in which everyone has a seat at the table and people negotiate like grown-ups rather than squabbling children.
This advance put an end to such travesties as communities opening up fire hydrants and spilling water into desert streets to maintain their claim to their "share." The old policy bred bad behavior. Better planning and an original model have already led to significantly better outcomes.
While we are in the lead in this process, it's happening all over the region. At the 100th anniversary of the Salt River Project in Phoenix -- a multipurpose water reclamation project that has resulted in irrigation, flood control and hydroelectric power -- I was prepared to give a speech excoriating the authority for its long-standing defense of traditional water use.
Before I spoke, Salt River President Bill Schrader explained that when he'd started more than 20 years earlier, 80 percent of the project's water went to agriculture and ranching.
His greatest accomplishment, he said, was changing the distribution. In 2003 Salt River's water use was more than 65 percent urban. When my turn at the podium came, I threw away my text and simply applauded.
This process, called reallocation, has become common throughout the Southwest. It is old news in California, and has been going on in Nevada for a long time.
The real question is not whether water will be transferred from rural to urban use. The debate concerns the terms of the transfer, how rural communities that cede water will derive fair and valuable benefits from it.
The best place to start this process would be with a new Colorado River Compact. The "law of the river" dates from the 1920s and is the most flawed and destructive piece of legislation I know.
"The fiction of the river," as I call it, puts water in the hands of the few -- in California, 3.8 million of the state's 4.4 million acre-feet of water go to three agricultural districts in eastern California -- for extraneous economic uses.
Irrigated water actually grows cotton outside of Yuma, Ariz. The last time I looked, cotton was not a scarce commodity.
By centralizing water in an economically inefficient way, the Colorado River Compact impoverishes the future. It slows job growth in urban areas, making it harder for the middle class of the future to thrive.
It even hurts democracy, for it makes it harder for people to find their way to a vested interest in the system. The water could create good jobs that lead to new mortgages, to prosperity for people until now left out of the American Dream. We're all hurt directly or indirectly by this archaic law.
A new Colorado River Compact could begin by taking the federally legislated division of water and assigning allocations on the basis of existing law. Prior commitments and legislatively mandated uses would come first.
Then the rest of the water could be assigned a monetary value by participating stakeholders who would determine the economic efficiency of proposed uses. The funds generated by this water would be divided among those who gave it up and the entities that administered the process.
In that way, two social goods would occur: The people who gave up the water will be fairly and justly compensated and be able to go forward with their lives. We would also have the resources to maintain existing infrastructure and to expand it to meet new demand, allowing economic growth to continue.
The result might be a kind of economic expansion we have not yet seen. Not only can we erase nearly a century of bad policy, we can also create a more efficient, fairer and more productive system that lets more people have a shot at a middle-class life.
This revolution is already under way -- we're really discussing its terms. No matter what you call it, this change is a critical step in maintaining the ongoing economic health of the valley.
In Friday's Sun: An examination of the Las Vegas economy.
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