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

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