There's a saying in Nevada - whisky's for drinking and water's for fighting.
Both of Nevada's urban centers are outgrowing their available water supply.
Clark County is dependent on the Colorado River for its water. Under the terms of a nearly 100-year-old multiple state agreement, Nevada receives 4% of the water that travels by it on the Colorado. Of the remaining 96%, about three-quarters (!) is used to turn the Mojave Desert in Arizona and California into artificial farms. The sensible solution for Las Vegas to get more is to purchase downstream water rights and draw these new amounts of water into the metropolitan area using our existing water intakes, but local officials have never attempted such negotiations.
Others suggest a sensible solution is to construct water desalination projects along the Pacific or Gulf of Mexico, as described in this Wall Street Journal article.
Instead, the politicians have aligned with powerful labor interests to propose the largest public works project in the history of the state, a pipeline running up the Nevada side of the Utah-Nevada border to drain the areas around the Great Basin National Park. The project's ecological ruin is swept under the rug daily (the waters that would be piped to Clark County do not renew since they are the result of hundreds of years of rainfall, so experts estimate Clark County would have taken all of it as quickly as seventy five years) and the massive tax hikes required to fund the pipeline project remain undiscussed. But the promise of thousands of unskilled labor jobs - even though they're temporary - is enough to keep the labor lobby reminding the politicans that they'll "lose labor's support" if the politicians start using common sense.
Supporters of raiding Nevada's interior rather than trying to get more from the Colorado River point to a study from California science students that Lake Mead could dry up within fifteen years. The Review Journal's editorial board responded skeptically, as did many other scientists.
Meanwhile, this website chronicles the current reservoir levels of Lake Mead, and this website chronicles the current reservoir levels of Lake Powell, upstream from Lake Mead. This website chronicles the snowpack for the Colorado River basins.
Posted by Webmaster on June 24, 2009 under Water
A cynic might say the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority has engineered a big rise in the water levels of reservoirs upstream from Lake Mead in order to preserve the appearance of extended draught for short-sighted Las Vegans. Her motive would be to create public support for her environmentally- and taxpayer-destructive plan to drain water basins hundreds of miles north of Las Vegas, which would allow her to spend billions of construction dollars and collect political patronage like iron filings to a magnet.
Here’s the story from KLAS channel 8. You decide.
Posted by Webmaster on February 27, 2009 under News, Water
Never mind that for the second year in a row, snowpack feeding the upper Colorado River is over 100% of normal, Bloomberg News has penned a comprehensive article about water drought in the Southwestern United States. It’s the first mention in the mainstream media of the immense wealth held by the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
The Southern Nevada Water Authority is about halfway through a 30-year, $8.3 billion construction campaign. Last year, 57 percent of the money for it came from a $6,310 fee to hook up new homes. The Las Vegas real estate slump is so severe that total hookup collections dropped to $61.5 million last year from $188.4 million in 2006. Mulroy says the authority actually lost money on hookups in January because of refunds to developers who abandoned construction projects.
As a result, reserves in the construction fund dropped 6 percent in the first six weeks of 2009, to $480 million. Without those reserves, Mulroy says, she couldn’t assure investors the authority would be able to repay the $500 million in bonds she plans to start selling by early fall to complete the Lake Mead project. The authority had $3.9 billion in liabilities on June 30.
The authority also gets money from water deliveries, property taxes and fees from federal land sales. If she has to protect the reserves, Mulroy says, she’ll raise water rates, which total about $21 a month for a single-family home.
She’s asked fellow Nevadan Harry Reid, the U.S. Senate majority leader, for a federal guarantee on the bonds. Reid is exploring how to help big municipal water systems, including Mulroy’s, get easier access to credit, spokesman Jon Summers says.
In February, Mulroy presented such a dire description of the authority’s finances to the Nevada legislature that Jerry Claborn, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, told her, “You’ll have to do like you did years ago: rub two sticks together.”
Mulroy said afterward she wanted to quash any notion that cash-strapped legislators could appropriate her reserves for some other purpose.
In mainstream media tradition, the reporters got it wrong. The Water Authority has $3.9-billion in assets and $2.4-billion in liabilities, leaving a net worth of $1.5-billion – a half billion of that in cash. And they let Mulroy get away with claiming that she’s “tried everything” to get water, thus her environmentally ruinous plan to drain Lincoln and White Pine Counties.
What’s not been tried is a serious effort at buying water from downstream water right owners on the Colorado River. That makes a great deal of sense because we already own the infrastructure to draw it into Las Vegas, via the water intake system on Lake Mead. Billions of unneccesary construction could be saved, but sometimes the Water Authority seems to try so hard to ignore this common-sense solution that one wonders if there is political (or even financial) gain in spending billions on the pipeline.
Posted by Webmaster on November 28, 2008 under Population, Water
The Las Vegas Review Journal reports a 4% decrease in water consumption for southern Nevada so far this year – and a possible decrease in our official population as well.
Posted by Webmaster on November 9, 2008 under News, Water
The Las Vegas Review Journal ran a story this morning about the failure (at least so far) of the Las Vegas Springs Preserve.
The article outlines how the Preserve has failed to achieve ticket sales forecasts, and how Las Vegas water ratepayers are having to subsidize its ongoing operations.
So far, taxpayers have spent $235-million putting it together (the state museum is still under construction). In the one year it has been open, just over 200,000 people have been onto the grounds. Dividing the cost into the number of visitors equals over $1,000 per customer.
The $1,000 per customer cost is merely the capital cost. It turns out the Preserve is operating at a gaping loss as well – with a $10-million first year estimate, the operating loss will run another $50 per customer (the most customers pay is $15 per person; though with an annual family pass costing $75 covering up to seven people in for unlimited visits, the average customer fee is a tiny fraction of $15).
Worse, “the Preserve’s first few days were among its busiest.” In other words, there is some doubt the second year utilization will be any better than the first year, so the operating loss could get worse next year.
At the end of the day, taxpayers paid over $1,000 per visitor and will pay another $50 per visitor per year to make the Springs Preserve experience happen – all without setting foot onto the grounds.
