Nevada State Engineer challenge to Southern Nevada Water Authority: Prove you won’t pump Snake Valley dry

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Since the big hearings on Southern Nevada’s plan to take water from eastern Nevada’s Great Basin aquifer began, water officials have been able to avoid presenting scientific predictions about how pumping will affect the lifeblood of that region’s ranchers, plants and animals.

But in July, the state official who is deciding how much of that water will be allocated to the Las Vegas Valley ordered the Southern Nevada Water Authority to run complex, computer-based modeling to develop those predictions about Snake Valley. The results may determine the future of not just urban Clark County, where officials are desperate for more water to sustain unprecedented growth, but also whether the ranching way of life in rural eastern Nevada will continue.

“It has very important implications for all of us” throughout the state, said Launce Rake, a Las Vegas-based spokesman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, a group opposing the pipeline.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority has cast a large net across the Great Basin in search of unclaimed water. It has won water rights from Spring, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys, and it envisions filling a $3 billion, 250-mile pipeline from the high desert to Las Vegas. But still up for grabs is the water beneath Snake Valley, a rich agricultural region that straddles the Nevada-Utah state line. Because of the location, Utah has a say in the matter.

On the Nevada side, State Engineer Tracy Taylor decides who gets water and how much. In the case of Snake Valley, Taylor is saying — for the first time — that before he makes a ruling, the Southern Nevada Water Authority must present a model of the basin and make predictions of what will happen over the next 200 years of pumping the valley.

The demand caught Las Vegas water attorneys by surprise at a preliminary hearing in July. During a morning briefing over Snake Valley, attorneys for the Water Authority had argued that the final showdown over its plans to import billions of gallons of water each year from rural parts of the state should begin in January. They had been through it all before and wanted to move forward as quickly as possible.

But their momentum evaporated with the demand for modeling. They promptly changed their tune about the timeline. They said the Water Authority couldn’t prepare a model by summer. With that, the state engineer’s staff members said they would likely postpone hearings until fall 2009.

Longtime observers say Taylor’s decision to require a model probably comes from the increasing comfort with, and expertise at, modeling among his own staff. “He has now brought on his staff people that are very competent modelers,” said John Bredehoeft, a retired hydrologist who long lobbied Taylor to use modeling. “Without that (expertise) on his own staff, the state engineer was limited with respect to what the models were telling him.”

Without hydrologists on staff, Taylor could only listen to quarreling experts and weigh their testimony. With the Water Authority’s experts arguing that modeling wasn’t particularly useful as a predictive tool, Taylor seemingly gave little weight to the models done by the protesters, Bredehoeft said. “He didn’t listen to what we said,” he recalled. “The first time I have really seen him take cognizance of the model was in the Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar decision.”

Read the rest of this story from the Las Vegas Sun by clicking here.

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