Lawyers eye looming water wars

By Stephanie Tavares

Friday, March 6, 2009 | 2 a.m.

RENO — As the specter of climate change looms ever closer, it has become more likely that Southern Nevada municipalities will have to fight for their lives — and those fights will be over water.

Municipal and regional water managers are recruiting an army of lawyers and preparing to go to war for resources. At stake is the West’s main water supply — a sum of water that most climate models expect to shrink as greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb and the temperatures of the Earth’s surface and seas rise.

And some battles have already begun.

CLE International, a company that prepares continuing legal education sessions for lawyers across the country, held a session Feb. 26-27 in Reno to share with water lawyers, water managers and concerned citizens the latest laws, strategies and problems facing Nevada and the West.

Nevada is home to numerous disputes over who owns and who should own the water in more than 230 hydrologic basins, water managers at the event said.

In Northern Nevada, locals are hammering out agreements that would protect property owners’ water rights while allowing rivers to run freely.

Negotiations on some of these water allotments have been going on for decades.

At the same time, ranchers and environmentalists are fighting the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s plan to pump hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water it has acquired rights to out of rural eastern Nevada and pipe it hundreds of miles to Las Vegas.

On both sides are those battling to preserve a way of life for local residents — ranchers need water for cows, sheep and their fodder; environmentalists are trying to save animals and wild lands and the Water Authority is trying to save the Las Vegas Valley from the threat of doom should its measly portion of the Colorado River peter out.

There are more than a dozen bill draft requests in the Nevada Legislature proposing changes to water law.

Nowhere in the West is water such a key issue as in Las Vegas.

The valley needed more water than its local underground supply could provide by the end of the 1960s.

Nevada gets 2 percent of the water flow coming down the Colorado River into Lake Mead. But the approximately 300,000 acre-feet it was allotted was based on an abnormally wet period in the Colorado River Basin and failed to include any water that should have been apportioned to American Indian tribes across the region.

It also doesn’t include the water apportioned to agricultural interests in every Colorado River Basin state except Nevada.

Southern Nevada depends on Lake Mead for 90 percent of its water needs. Its residents already use more water than is allotted to the valley, which it has been permitted to do as long as the same amount of water is returned to the lake in the form of treated wastewater.

Growth in population or industries reliant on water (coal and solar thermal power plants, for example) would mean the need for even more water.

Nevada and other Lower Basin states — California and Arizona — have agreed to a series of storage and sharing agreements. And neighboring states have been negotiating with American Indian tribes to divvy up water supplies.

Then there are federal issues of water quality — both for consumption and for recreation — as well as river flow involving the Endangered Species Act.

Managing all these concerns has required changes in state and federal law that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, lawyers at the conference said.

And it’s only the beginning.

Some lawyers speculated the United States could see massive climate change lawsuits against the petroleum, coal and automotive industries similar to those seen against the tobacco industry.

And if climate change results in a less robust Colorado River as expected, the entire region would have to make drastic legal and water management changes.

In the years ahead we could see water conservation legislation, contracts and treaties involving desalination plants in other states or Mexico, and water markets through which hydrological basins across the continent could move water from those receiving too much rain and snow to sell it to those with too little.

But the lawyers warned once changes of this magnitude become necessary it could take decades to accomplish if cooperation and the willingness to share don’t exist.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” said Robert Johnson, former U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner. “Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to come together. Catastrophe is a motivating force.”