Did Utah blink in Snake Valley talks?

About halfway through secret four-year negotiations on how a reluctant Utah could share the Snake Valley aquifer with Nevada, a Silver State official and a Las Vegas water utility threatened they could take the matter to court or to Congress, memos and e-mails show. The correspondence, released under an open-records request from the Great Basin Water Network, illuminates Nevada's no-surrender insistence that Snake Valley water be split 50-50, even though Utah officials believed that impossible. The documents also appear to undermine recent assurances from Mike Styler, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, that the proposed water-sharing agreement is as good for Utah as it is for Nevada. It's not, critics have said repeatedly at public meetings and in comments submitted to the Utah Division of Water Rights since the August announcement of a draft deal with Nevada to plumb the west desert. "It might be an exaggeration to say we got rolled, but we surely backtracked," said Steve Erickson of the Great Basin Water Network. "I was surprised the state backed down on all those positions and that they're advocating this agreement so adamantly when once they were opposed to them." Many critics have denounced the agreement as a giveaway to Las Vegas at the expense of an aquifer that can maintain equilibrium only with its current water drawdown...read more