The City That Wasn’t Supposed to Be - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 148

In 2007, Durbin testified before Nevada state engineer Tracy Taylor but didn't men-
tion the results of his model because, he told the LasVegasSun,no one asked about
them. Taylor granted Las Vegas the use of forty thousand acre-feet of Spring Valley wa-
ter a year, for ten years. (The city is required to monitor its withdrawals and file an an-
nual report. After a decade, the withdrawals can be raised to sixty thousand acre-feet a
year, unless they cause problems.)
After the hearing, Durbin said, he felt great remorse for what he had left unspoken.
In 2008 he once again appeared before Taylor, only this time he represented a group of
pipeline critics. He put the results of his ground-water model on the record. To his sur-
prise, the SNWA hardly reacted. Only later did he realize why: they had already gotten
what they wanted—approval to pump water from the valleys—and had no incentive to
call attention to his damning projections.
Pat Mulroy shrugs of Durbin and Katzer as “two consultants” and their research as
“just a model.”
Opponents to the SNWA pipeline, such as the Great Basin Network, relied on
Simeon Herskovits, a slim, bushy-haired, and bespectacled environmental attorney
from Taos, New Mexico, to press their case. In 2007, Herskovits challenged a state senate
ruling that had denied pipeline protesters a hearing within a year of the close of the
protest period, as is required by law. When his motion was denied, he appealed the case
up to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Over the next two years, the SNWA won a string of victories. In 2008, State Engineer
Taylor granted Las Vegas almost nineteen thousand acre-feet of water from its first three
claims in Cave, Dry Lake, and Delamar Valleys, south of Snake Valley. In the summer
of 2009, as the fight over Snake Valley escalated, so did Mulroy's rhetoric. She declared
that if the SNWA board voted to halt the pipeline, the result would be “an absolute hole”
in Las Vegas's water supply by 2020. She said that without a secure water supply, Nevada
would have a difficult time recovering from the recession. Without a backup supply, she
warned Las Vegans, “ You're going to live like Amman, Jordan . You're going to get water
once a week … [if] you don't have water in hydrants, you can't put out a major fire.”
In the end, Taylor granted Las Vegas about half the rural water it wanted, some 6 bil-
lion gallons annually. And in August 2009, Utah governor Gary R. Herbert agreed to al-
low the SNWA to pipe thirty-six thousand acre-feet of water a year from the Great Basin
to Las Vegas. Pat Mulroy had won. After twenty years of cajoling, maneuvering, spend-
ing, and compromising, the SNWA had at last secured the right to build its pipeline.
Two months later, the victory began to unravel.
In October 2009, Nevada district judge Norman C. Robison struck down Tracy
Taylor's rulings on three of the four rural basins—Cave, Delamar and Dry Lake Val-
leys—along Las Vegas's pipeline. The state engineer had “acted arbitrarily, capriciously