Five options on tap in case water dries up

Thursday, April 5, 2007 | 7:11 a.m.

The same day that environmentalists attacked a bill in the Nevada Legislature to limit public access to water appropriation decisions, the people who control the floodgates of the Southwestern dam system milled around the Sierra Room of the Henderson Convention Center, waiting for a concerned public to arrive. Six people finally did.

So for most of Tuesday evening, Bureau of Reclamation water masters were their own audience, discussing the most pressing question before Las Vegans: How will a region that feels cheated by its present quota of Colorado River water cope if persistent drought makes the current allotment of 300,000 acre-feet a year seem like the days of plenty?

There's water for now, but cutbacks could occur within five years, if bathtub rings forming around Lake Mead continue to drop another 125 feet.

The bureau did not bring answers about dealing with shortages but offered a thick bundle of suggestions. Five scenarios dominate the Interior Department's newly issued environmental impact statement. The six people who showed up Tuesday night got a CliffsNotes version, because the original document - with its hundreds of pages, graphs, matrixes and mind-numbing acronyms - is as thick as a Bible and as readily comprehensible as the original Greek.

The option favored by the Southern Nevada Water Authority and Colorado River Commission involves a sophisticated mix of water banking and credits - building reservoirs to capture water before it flows to Mexico, along with more flexible river maintenance. Hammered out with stakeholders in the seven states served by the Colorado, the Western imprimatur is signaled with the graceless title "Basin States Alternative."

It assumes aggressive conservation, says George Caan, executive director of Nevada's Colorado River Commission. However, while there is much crossover in conservation measures among the various options, the Sierra Club and other environmental contributors prefer the "Conservation Before Shortage Alternative." It includes an intriguing water credit system, not unlike the carbon credits of the Kyoto Protocol. The third contender, the "Reservoir Storage Alternative," keeps reservoirs high and may be most favored by recreational boaters, bureau spokesperson Robert Walsh says.

Two of the five options seem to have been expressly included for their value in cutting. The first: "The No Action" alternative stipulates no change in policy, which sounds resigned until you hear about the "Water Supply Alternative." It calls for such concerted inaction that it would keep water flowing even if Hoover Dam ran dry and Lake Mead dried up.

The alternative with the consensus and political muscle is the aforementioned Basin States Alternative. Provided the draft study on tour with Bureau of Reclamation officials returns unscathed, some version of it looks likely to be the option that will go to the Interior Department early next year.

Certainly there was no resistance expressed Tuesday night.