State of the Rockies 2007

Day 1 Keynote: Nevada faces constant water strain, and will for generations to come

By Daniel Berger
assistant editor
Headwaters News
April 11,2007

(Read about the water panel)

The economic philosopher Thomas Malthus made the connection between resource scarcity, population growth and human innovation more than 200 years ago, arguing against those who said we would run out of food when the population hit a certain point.

No, we won’t, argued Malthus, because resource scarcity spurs human innovation. As the world has adapted to billions of inhabitants, and the U.S. hits 300 million, two centuries later, despite plenty of failures, we have adapted, though how well is certainly up for argument.

One of the greatest areas of innovations surrounds the use of fresh water, especially in the West. Whatever one’s feelings about Grand Coulee and Glen Canyon dam, one cannot argue against the engineering feats they are. (I’d even go so far as to say that the drought in the early 1970s spurred a different kind of innovation, one in which kids found a new way to skateboard in drained swimming pools.)

More recently, though, innovation regarding water surrounds policy, legislation and governance. And perhaps nowhere is that innovation better illustrated than by the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Though, again, one can argue that its brand of innovation may not follow wisdom.

Kay Brothers, deputy general manager for the South Nevada Water Authority, gave the keynote talk for the first day of the Colorado College State of the Rockies conference, happening now at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In her talk, she outlined how the growth of Las Vegas, along with the history of the Colorado Water Compact of 1922, spurred the creation of the authority in 1991.

But that same innovation and sense of cooperation that helped the authority form, and which has helped it succeed so far, is also going to be needed as the area addresses long-term growth, she added. And by long-term growth, Brothers doesn’t mean 50 years from now — that’s already being addressed — but the growth beyond 50 years.

The mission of the authority, Brothers began with, is to acquire, treat and deliver water to the area’s 1.8 million residents, and 40 million yearly visitors. It is comprised of seven members from local organizations, including the city of Las Vegas, the city of Henderson, Boulder City and others. Each organization has one voting member, regardless of its size, and members’ responsibilities are to manage all of the water resources available to southern Nevada.

The city of Las Vegas really started to grow in 1905, and by 1913, Clark County realized the need to regulate groundwater wells. Interestingly, this was a half-century before most other western states realized or acted on such a need. By 1920, the city had 8,000 residents. Two years later, the Colorado River Water Compact was signed.

“There’s going to be a day of reckoning, so we better be looking for augmentation if we’re going to continue to grow.”

Whereas many of the other six states in that compact received more than a million acre feet of water in their allotment, Nevada received only 300,000 acre feet for their consumptive use, likely because the state was deemed too hot for most people and the desert didn’t offer much potential for agriculture, which is what the compact aimed to address.

Projections on growth for Las Vegas from the 1920s forward consistently underestimated actual growth, but by the 1950s, at a population of 47,000 people, the city still wasn’t using all of its allotted water. Over the next two decades, the population would climb to 270,000 people, and as the aquifer below the city began to show signs of shrinking and the Colorado River allotment began to fill, cities and municipalities in southern Nevada began to fight for current and future water because, as Brother said, “cities could see the end was in sight.”

The competition for Colorado River water grew tight, and municipalities would have to use what they had or else risk losing it. So, together, many of these entities decided they needed a regional entity to manage the water. By 1991, the Southern Nevada Regional Water Authority was created, and was acting as a singular force in securing water.

By the mid-1990s, Brothers said, there was also a shift in the way water was doled out to developers: they had to not only prove it was available, but also had to spend a lot of money to secure all of the other permits before they actually received any water.

As for that Colorado River allotment, the authority began to work on ways of managing it better. They developed a water bank project in Arizona to store their allotted amount, which was actually 480,000 acre-feet (consumptive use was 300,000 acre-feet). And though the late 1990s, the state was able to bank more than 1.25 million acre-feet of water in banks and Lake Mead.

But those were flush times for water, and by the early part of this decade, the region was again in drought. More specifically, the upper reaches of the Colorado River watershed — the headwaters states that feed the river system — were experiencing drought. So the agency returned to the business of innovation, providing incentives for homeowners to rip up lawns, conducting water audits for businesses and developing other efficiency programs involving wastewater and return flows.

The agency has been successful, Brothers said, because it is limited in scope, the members each brought something to the table and members were willing to collaborate and coordinate.

But while present water supplies seem to be covered, Brothers admits to worrying about the future, when innovation and efficiency will have squeezed all of the available water from the state’s Colorado River allotment and from its groundwater resources, which she said are already heavily regulated.

“We’re not a land-use planning agency. We find water for the land-use planning agencies,” Brothers said. “We can go to the land-use planning agencies and say, ‘We don’t have any water for you,’ but we’re not there yet.”

That future is just over the horizon, when growth might finally overtake supplies.

“There’s going to be a day of reckoning,” Brothers said, “so we better be looking for augmentation if we’re going to continue to grow.” Especially given climate change and the steady decline of overall water in the Colorado River system, she added.

What might that augmentation look like? Brothers couldn’t say for sure, beyond saying the agency is conducting a long-term augmentation study. Ideas include a desalinization plant in Mexico and piping water from the Columbia River system, to name a few — but these are merely ideas.

“We’ll have a train coming at us, “Brothers said, “if people keep moving to the West.