Under the new schedule, notices of the applications by Las Vegas for permission to tap rural groundwater over thousands of square miles will be published in regional Nevadan newspapers in November. The period in which affected parties may lodge legal protests entitling them to participate in the hearings will close in late December.

The requirement to re-hear the cases stemming from 1989 applications by Las Vegas comes at a time that Nevada is in an unprecedented budget crisis. To accomplish hearings for an…

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Updated 11/19/2009 9.21am PST

ITEM 5 on the agenda for this Thursday’s board meeting of the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls for the directors to take an October 15, 2009 decision by a Nevada district judge Norman C. Robison to the state Supreme Court.

The Robison decision deemed a 2008 award of water to Las Vegas and the SNWA by the State Engineer of Nevada from three Lincoln County valleys  ”arbitrary, oppressive and a manifest abuse of discretion.” It then vacated the award for water in the three valleys that are the key first staging grounds of a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline that Las Vegas plans to run into the heart of the state to pump rural groundwater.

Why did the judge rule the way he did? According to Robison, the water — 18,755 acre feet of it a year (or enough for 37,000 homes) — isn’t there. “The state engineer acknowledged within his ruling…

Its legs are too long. It's a Model Cave Harvestman, or very rare daddy long legs, which is unique to the Great Basin National Park, where discoveries of new life-forms could stand in the way of a controversial groundwater pumping plan by Las Vegas. Photo: John Locher / Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click on the Harvestman to be taken to more photos by Locher and to read about an underground tour of Nevada's only national park by environment reporter Henry Brean in Sunday's Review-Journal. Thanks to John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal and jfleck at inkstain for catching this deliciously creepy and wondrous story out of Las Vegas.

A CRITIC of Las Vegas’s conservation efforts last week dared the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority to match the conservation achieved by Albuquerque before it sought to tap Great Basin Aquifer with its proposed pipeline.

Albuquerque, said the critic, was down to 80 gallons per person per day, compared with Las Vegas’s 250. At the close of the meeting, Southern Nevada Water Authority Board Director Susan Brager was intrigued. “There are some things that I’d like to see us pursue further,” she said. “Are those 80 gallons from people a reality? Does our public really know what they use? … We’ve done a good job [at conservation], I think we can do better.”

The memo is out. Today Scott Huntley, a spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, was hot on the trail of those numbers, in the course of which he asked Chance of Rain for a clarification.…