The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 147

pipe of its own, which would suck water from Lake Powell and send it through south-
western Utah, then up to St. George, a retirement mecca and one of the fastest-growing
cities in the nation.
Behind closed doors, representatives of the two states tried to forge what appeared to
be a quid pro quo: if Nevada backed Utah's bid for a St. George pipeline (which would
require a federal right-of-way ruling), then Utah would back SNWA's pipeline to Snake
Valley. But the negotiations dragged. In 2006, Pat Mulroy declared that the longer Utah
waited to endorse SNWA's pipeline, “the more uncomfortable it will become for Utah.
If they can do it to another state, they can have it done to them, too.” Offended, Utah
refused to sign a water-sharing agreement with Nevada. Mulroy dismissed this as petty
and said, “Our main driver for developing groundwater is for drought protection.”
In 2010, the two states were still squabbling. Mulroy sniped that Salt Lakers didn't
know how to spell the word conservation,while Utahans scoffed at Mulroy's offer to
swap Snake Valley water for a greater allotment of Colorado River water: “It's a good
news bite, but it's not possible [under the Colorado Compact] and she knows it,” said a
government official.
A MODEL
In the early 1980s, when Timothy Durbin was head of USGS's California office, he
modeled the effects of pumping water from the Owens Valley. In 2001, he joined Terry
Katzer at the SNWA as a groundwater consultant. When he forecasts the effect of trans-
porting water out of the Great Basin, Durbin told the LasVegasSun,“he Owens Valley
is a model of what to expect.”
Las Vegas has applied to withdraw ninety thousand acre-feet a year of water from
Spring Valley. To simulate what effect such withdrawals might have, Katzer and Durbin
created a computer model that showed the valley's water table would drop two hundred
feet or more over seventy-five years. This would kill off the greasewood, as planned. But
it could also dry up thousands of acres of federally owned land, destroy endangered spe-
cies and other animals, and close down ranches founded by Nevada's pioneer families.
Suddenly, the comparisons to Owens Valley didn't seem so far-fetched.
The Nevada state engineer is the arbiter of whether the pipeline project can move
ahead. Once an applicant files for water rights, the state engineer has eight months to
review the claim, hear objections, and render a decision. The amount of water awarded
is determined by whether withdrawals will affect existing water rights holders, and how
much withdrawn water will be replaced by rain and snowmelt.