Water could be contentious issue during Legislature’s special session

By Cy Ryan (contact)

Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 | 11 p.m.

Water has sparked some of the biggest political battles in the West. And lawmakers and advocates say it could bring a contentious atmosphere to the special session if Gov. Jim Gibbons decides to put on the agenda a legislative fix to the recent Nevada Supreme Court water ruling.

The court on Jan. 28 ruled that the state engineer must decide within one year whether to grant an application for water rights. The decision overturned a ruling by state Engineer Tracy Taylor, who had approved an application by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to withdraw 40,000 acre feet a year from Spring Valley in eastern Nevada. The water was to be delivered to Southern Nevada via a pipeline.

State officials say the ruling could have far-reaching effects beyond the water authority's pipeline project, affecting thousand of water rights granted back to 1947.

"I don't know what he's got up his sleeve," Assemblyman Jerry Claborn, D-Las Vegas, chairman of the Assembly Natural Resources, Agriculture and Mining Committee, said of Gibbons' plans. "But water is controversial."

Susan Lynn, coordinator for the Great Basin Water Network, one of the winners in the court battle with the Southern Nevada Water Authority, wondered whether a special session would allow enough time to adequately discuss such a complex issue. Special legislative sessions are limited to 20 days.

"Water is a contentious issue that needs a lot of discussion," she said.

But Sen. Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas, a member of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, said finding a solution to the recent ruling wouldn't need to prolong the special session. The Legislature must clarify a 2003 law to fully restore thousand of water rights, Coffin said.

"I don't see it as being contentious," Coffin said.

The 2003 Legislature amended the law to permit the state engineer to postpone action on pending applications made for a municipal use. District Judge Norman Robison ruled that the 2003 law applied to the rights filed by the water authority in 1989.

The Supreme Court overturned Robison's ruling.

Allen Biaggi, director of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, has drafted a bill to be presented during the special session, which will get under way Feb. 23.

Gibbons is considering adding Biaggi's bill to the agenda, but opponents of the water authority are hoping to prevent that.

"We hope to sideswipe it at the governor's office," said Lynn, who is lobbying that water should not be part of the agenda for a special session called to focus on the state's budget problems.

The Supreme Court ordered Robison of Ely to decide whether the authority is required to file new applications or if the state must only reopen the protest period and the hearings.

Since the ruling, an estimated 210 water right applications have been refiled with the state engineer's office.

Environmental groups and private land owners in Eastern Nevada fought through the courts the state's approval of the Water Authority's application for water rights in Spring Valley.

The Water Authority applied for 800,000 acre feet of water in 1989 in various areas of rural Nevada. At that time, the law required the state engineer to rule on the requests within one year after the final protest. By 1990, there were more than 830 protests filed. The state granted the rights in 2007.

Both the state attorney general and Southern Nevada Water Authority say they will ask the Supreme Court to re-consider its ruling.