Vegas pipeline hearing timeline sketched
FOLLOWING a series of damning court decisions that vacated almost 80,000 acre feet a year of groundwater awards to Las Vegas from four valleys in rural Nevada, the State Engineer has published a tentative schedule to re-notice and re-hear the cases. If the brisk timeline is kept, the decisions over whether or not to tap the Great Basin Aquifer to slake Las Vegas could come as early as mid-February 2012.
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.
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“The proper and most equitable remedy”
A typical entrance to a ranch in Spring Valley, Nevada. Yesterday's decision by the Nevada Supreme Court leaves 2007 awards of Spring Valley groundwater to Las Vegas standing, but calls for the reopening of a protest period that could usher in a powerful new generation of pipeline opponents. Photo: Emily Green
UPDATED: The Nevada Supreme Court yesterday issued a revision of a January ruling in which it again concluded that the State Engineer of Nevada violated due process rights of protestors by failing to hold timely public hearings on a plan by Las Vegas to tap rural groundwater. As remedy, the Court called for a new protest period that could refresh the ranks of pipeline opponents. However, the decision stopped short of voiding water awards already made to Las Vegas.
In 1989, the Las Vegas agency that is now part of the Southern Nevada Water Authority made sweeping applications…
Kay sera sera
Kay Brothers retires this week as Deputy General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. There will probably be parties and there should be toasts, during which she may be heralded as a force in developing groundwater storage programs for the Las Vegas Valley Water District in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Even her worst critics would have to raise a glass. The kind of storage of Colorado River water undertaken by Brothers and Terry Katzer, the man who hired her in 1986 at the SNWA seed agency, was a model of progressive water management in a desert where evaporation empties reservoirs with sparkling remorselessness — and in a valley where subsidence is measured in feet, not inches.
However, it is unlikely that she will be remembered for that. Rather, second only to her boss Pat Mulroy, Brothers has been Justifier-in-Chief for the Las Vegas pipeline project unveiled in …
Surrender Dorothy
Abandoned buildings in Pioche, Lincoln County, Nevada. The county partnered with Vidler Water Co. out of the belief that this would protect its groundwater reserves from predation by Las Vegas. Instead, Vidler partnered with Las Vegas and a massive private developer. The benefit to towns like Pioche, other than sharing water revenue with Vidler, remains unclear.
Talk about Westerns: Over the weekend, Henry Brean of the Las Vegas Review Journal, dusted down a honey of a grudge match.
It’s in Nevada, and Nevada being the driest state in the union, it’s about water.
To the south, we have Patricia Mulroy, the blonde general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, who formed her agency expressly around the idea of building a nearly 300-mile-long pipeline into the wild heart of the state to sustain otherwise impossible growth around Las Vegas.
To the north, there is the brunette. Dorothy Timian-Palmer, …
Notes on a skirmish
Goliath wasn’t really trying, didn’t really want to win and it never really was a contest. That’s the upshot of the response from the Southern Nevada Water Authority after a proposed amendment to do with its massive haul of water awards out of central Nevada failed to pass during the special session of state legislature, which closed early Monday.
Those opposing the amendment along with the SNWA’s proposed pipeline into the heart of the state claimed a huge victory. Dozens of Vegas lobbyists turned away! A great day for justice, the small man, everything good!
The Las Vegas water authority shrugged it off, saying that it had been working for the amendment in Carson City simply to help a beleaguered state natural resources agency protect thousands of water awards threatened as a byproduct of a nuisance suit brought by the pipeline protestors.…
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