More Water for Las Vegas Means More Resentment in Rural Areas

For Jason King, Nevada’s state engineer, the final months of 2011 were hardly a breeze. On top of his usual workload, he and his resource-strapped office, which manages parched Nevada’s precious water resources, oversaw six weeks of hearings on a controversial permit application, punctuated by often impassioned testimony from 82 witnesses. But 2012 will be more stressful. The longtime civil servant has just over three months to digest tens of thousands of documents and transcript pages as he prepares to answer a decades-old question: If the Mountain States keep getting drier, how will Nevada keep Las Vegas, its economic juggernaut, from going thirsty? The Southern Nevada Water Authority, speaking for Las Vegas, thinks the solution lies beneath four valleys in Eastern Nevada, with a multibillion dollar pipeline that would pump valley water into Las Vegas. The plan sounds sensible to most business owners and developers in Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County, but Nevadans further east, particularly farmers and ranchers, fear the project would deplete already scarce resources, threatening their way of life. Nevada is not the only Western state that will spend part of this year debating a large-scale and polarizing water project. There’s the Lake Powell water pipeline within Utah, and the Wyoming-to-Colorado pipeline that Wyoming Governor Matt Mead has vehemently opposed. But neither of these would come close to the price and scope of the Las Vegas pipeline, nor have they sparked such fierce opposition...more