Gibbons to refer Las Vegas water snafu to legislature
BREAKING NEWS: The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons will refer to a special session of legislature a law repeatedly broken by the State Engineer in issuing water permits to Las Vegas. The hope of gaming and construction interests lobbying the governor is that the legislature could somehow amend state law in a way that retroactively makes legal the violation of due process rights of thousands of protestors to a multi-billion dollar pipeline proposed by Las Vegas. The pipe, planned to run almost 300 miles to the foot of the Great Basin National Park, would mine rural groundwater to sustain the suburbs and casinos of southern Nevada. For background on the governor’s stalling, click here, on the proposed legislation here, and on the pipe, here.
UPDATE: Nevadan readers who wish to e-mail, write or phone their legislators to comment on the proposed “fix” …
The governor will think about it
Fairly or unfairly, ever since a boozy incident in 2006 in which then Nevada gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons either groped a woman, or caught her during a slipping accident in a Las Vegas garage, the Southern Nevadan press has denied itself no opportunity to ridicule the man who the following year became the state’s executive.
The press attacks were arguably worse on the admittedly rare occasions when he made sense, and never so fierce as when Governor Gibbons dared question the wisdom of the swelling city’s proposed 300-mile pipeline into the Great Basin. (The second line of one such excoriation in the Las Vegas Sun in February 2008, headlined “Governor all wet,” read: “Fortunately, the governor alone cannot stop the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s plan to pump ground water from White Pine and Lincoln counties.”)
But, last weekend, facing a potentially devastating ruling from the Supreme Court of …
Whereas we screwed up the first time …
Behind the rain shadow, the news just gets more eye-popping. This deliciously poker-faced article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal is dated today but went live yesterday. Today, yesterday. Today, twenty years ago. What is time when there is groundwater in five rural basins in central eastern Nevada and to the south, hot dry Las Vegas wants it?
Time, it turns out, is the issue. Last month, the Supreme Court of Nevada ruled that the State Engineer had violated the due process rights of those protesting a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline proposed by Las Vegas. Under the law, hearings awarding Las Vegas rural water that began in 2006 should have begun in 1991.…
“There would just be so much litigation”
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is spinning so hard, it may need its own axis. This morning’s Las Vegas Review-Journal captures the angle and motion as the water agency led by Patricia Mulroy moves to defend the lawfulness of a massive haul of groundwater awards put into question last week by the Nevada Supreme Court decision Great Basin Water Network vs State Engineer.
Its defense, hinted at in a January 28 press release from the authority, is to insist that the Supreme Court was wrong to challenge awards that were to flush a nearly 300-mile-long Las Vegas pipeline because violating due process rights of protestors is a common practice of the State Engineer. …
“At long last, things are getting interesting”
Last updated 2/4/2010, 5.30am PST.
SOME comments deserve to be posts. This is the case of the response today of Eyewitness News investigative reporter George Knapp to Sunday’s feature There will be blood and its account of recent judicial reversals in the plan of the Southern Nevada Water Authority to drive a nearly 300 mile-long pipeline to the feet of the Great Basin National Park in a quest for groundwater for Las Vegas.
Knapp wrote: “… Already, the Nevada Supreme Court’s monumental [January 28] decision is being characterized by SNWA minions as a minor speedbump, a temporary procedural oopsie that will be rectified in a moment or two. It is clearly more than that.”
It clearly is. As Knapp points out, legal remedy for pipeline protestors found wronged in the Nevada Supreme Court decision is likely to be decided by a district judge who in October voided water awards in …
« go back — keep looking »North American Native Plant Societies
After the lawn
Garden blogs
