River panel rejects research funds request

Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005 | 11:19 a.m.

Concerned about the makeup of a panel of scientists set to study the Colorado River, the Nevada Colorado River Commission put off a request Tuesday to help pay for the work.

The commission, which is charged with negotiating with other states and the federal government over Colorado River issues, voted 7-0 to table a request by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council to fund the study.

The academy's research council has convened a panel of 12 scientists and engineers to study the tricky issue of how much water the Colorado River actually carries from the Rocky Mountains to water users in seven states, including Nevada.

It's an important question to policymakers who are now trying to decide how much water there is to share and how the states should divide the pain of any shortages.

The Colorado River is Southern Nevada's primary source of water. Nevada's annual allocation of 300,000 acre-feet from the river supplies 90 percent of the region's needs for 1.8 million residents and millions of visitors annually.

Colorado River Commission Chairman Richard Bunker questioned the makeup of the proposed panel that is intended to strengthen scientific understanding of the climate and flow of the river and what those results imply for the existing management practices.

"I'm concerned by some of these participants and concerned if there is an agenda," said Bunker, a commission member since 1993, former president of the Nevada Resort Association and former Clark County manager. "I was concerned from a political end not a technical end."

Bunker declined to publicly identify which members of the panel sparked his concerns or how the study results might be affected by those members. He would only say he was concerned about the quality of the study.

Since the 1920s the federal government and the seven basin states of the river have used an estimate of 16.5 million acre-feet annually as amount of water coming down the Colorado.

But now the river has suffered through more than five years of drought. As well, scientific analysis of centuries of tree rings and geologic evidence indicate that the amount of water in the Colorado River may average significantly less than the estimates.

Bunker's concerns were echoed by commission member Ace Robison, a government affairs consultant.

"I have no problem with the technical capability of this committee," Robison said. But he would like more local representation on the scientific panel, which is made up of 11 experts in water issues from across the country.

"We should have the opportunity to have at least one participant be in the oversight group," Robison said. "As I look at some of the people in this oversight group, it is completely ridiculous."

The panel actually has one Nevada member, Kelly Redmond, a climatologist with the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno. The center is part of the Desert Research Institute, the research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Marybel Batjer, Gov. Kenny Guinn's former chief of staff and a Harrah's vice president, was attending her first meeting as a commission member. Guinn appointed Batjer to the commission last month.

Batjer, who also was a cabinet secretary for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said the study itself was "perhaps very important" even if the Nevada commission has concerns about the makeup of the study group.

North Las Vegas Councilwoman Shari Buck, another commission member, asked the commission's water division chief, Jim Davenport, if Nevada already had the information that the research group was seeking.

The answer, Davenport said, is no, not for the hundreds of years of tree-ring studies and other data that the scientists are studying. He said the research panel's effort "is a technical question, but as the chairman notes, that is a political question as well."

Most members of the panel are present or former scientists and engineers at major universities or federal research agencies. Several others, however, have experience in what could be considered political posts.

One, Eluid Martinez, served as the top man in the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency with oversight over the lower Colorado River basin, for the Clinton administration. Martinez, who is a consultant on water issues in Santa Fe, N.M., could not immediately be reached by telephone.

The National Research Council is the research arm of the National Academy of Science, which is chartered by Congress to provide objective, scientific information to government agencies.

The academy and the National Research Council work to ensure that members of such panels meet three criteria, said Bill Kearney, a National Academy spokesman. They should have a technical expertise in the subject matter; they should help provide an overall balanced perspective on the issues; and there should not be any conflicts of interest among the members.

"They are picked for their competence and their appropriateness for the study," he said.

Ultimately, the studies that come out of the academy's process "are consensus reports."

"The committee has to come to consensus. Also, all of our reports have to go through outside peer review before they are published. The committee has to satisfy any concerns that would come up in the review process before the study will be released."

Redmond, the Nevada scientist serving on the panel, said he was not surprised to learn that the membership of the group would come into question.

"It's very interesting to hear this, but it's not terribly surprising," said Redmond, who was attending a conference on climate change in Sacramento. "The Colorado has just always been a contentious river, and this is just another indicator of that."

He said that to his knowledge, all of the panel members -- and Redmond said he knows about half of them well -- are qualified.

"To the extent that I know them, I didn't have any questions. I didn't have any reservations."

The overall question of how much demand the Colorado River can satisfy is very important, he said, especially as the annual volumes appear to be dropping while demand for the river resource in the West continues to grow.

Decades ago the issue of how much water was in the river wasn't important. The supply was much greater than the demand. That is changing as cities such as Las Vegas continue to grow in what was once open, arid Southwestern desert.

"There's been a lot of discussion over the years as to what this number should be, so that this issue has been visited many times. We know more now than we did then (when the river was first divided in the 1920s), but the demand is different now."

Redmond and other climatologists are intensely interested in the question of whether the global climate is changing, and if it is, if regions such as the West are more affected by the change than other areas. Redmond said the answer to both questions appears to be yes, at least so far.

"There's two piles of evidence, and the pile favoring climate change in the West is getting bigger," he said. "Summers have been warmer than usual in the West for the past five or six years."

But Redmond also warned that the evidence is not as clear cut as some observers would like.

"This is a noisy affair. It's not cut and dried. It's not totally trending in one direction ... Some of the things that we are seeing are consistent with what we expected, but that is not the whole of the climate change story. But it is a big part of it."

The council asked for $30,000 from Nevada's Colorado River Commission.

Kearney said that half of the total cost of $450,000 for the study is being paid for by the academy itself "because we feel it is such an important matter." He added that the academy's contribution to the funding of the study is unusual, since usually the federal government or other government agencies fund such efforts.

The academy hopes to receive partial funding from several other Western water agencies.

"We are expecting to get funding in the neighborhood of $25,000 to $50,000 from the Bureau of Reclamation, the state of California and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California," Kearney said.

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