April 23, 1991, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Battle Lines Drawn in Sand As Las Vegas Covets Water
BYLINE: By ROBERT REINHOLD, Special to The New York Times
SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 4; National Desk
LENGTH: 2110 words
This desert fantasy land of gambling casinos, lush lawns and fake lakes that is the fastest-growing major city in the United States will outstrip its water supplies by 1995 unless it soon finds new sources and conserves what it has.
Now Las Vegas is looking north to secure its future by harvesting water underneath vast, sparsely populated rural Nevada. The multibillion-dollar undertaking would pump water from an ancient aquifer in an area nearly as large as West Virginia and ship it south through more than 1,000 miles of pipelines.
Seventy years after the City of Los Angeles grabbed control of the water rights in the Owens Valley of California, with raw chicanery chronicled in the film "Chinatown," rural Nevadans say history is about to repeat itself. They fear that their land, like the Owens Valley, will become a dust bowl, its water diverted to build a vast city in an arid basin.
Reminder of Deeper Problem
The move by Las Vegas exemplifies the growing problem of the West, where cities are beginning to confront limits to growth, limits set by the shortage of water, a commodity as scarce in the West as sun, land and optimism are plentiful.
The five-year drought that has gripped the Southwest has only hastened the day of reckoning that many experts said was inevitable. Four water districts in Southern California have stopped accepting new customers. Home construction in Lake Elsinore, a fast-growing city north of San Diego, has been halted, and many communities along the parched central coast of California have imposed limits on new water connections, as has Marin County north of San Francisco.
The angry accusations of a "water grab" by Las Vegas are being argued over four days ending Thursday as Las Vegas water officials hold a series of meetings around Nevada to explain why the city should have the water. It is a debate about the kind of growth wanted in the West, about whether water-profligate cities like Las Vegas deserve more water, and about fears that Las Vegas's thirst might destroy rare animal and bird species and wetlands hundreds of miles away.
"The way you hold on to the future in the West is to take control of the water -- that draws the political, economic and demographic landscape," said Stephen T. Bradhurst, a Reno planning consultant engaged by rural Nye County. Nye has formed an alliance with Lincoln and White Pine counties in Nevada, Inyo County in California and others to fight Las Vegas.
Southern Nevada's power in the State Legislature, and a state law that allows outside parties to claim any water not being used, give Las Vegas the upper hand in the dispute. But opponents hope that the complicated interests of the Federal Government, which owns the vast majority of land in the state, will push the issue into Federal courts, where Las Vegas may be at more of a disadvantage.
The Las Vegas Valley Water District, the agency that has applied for the new water, supplies most of the water in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. Leaders of the agency say that they only want to tap unused water that is replenished every year and that the continued prosperity of Las Vegas, the largest city in the fastest-growing state, is essential to all Nevadans. "If Southern Nevada dies, Nevada dies," said Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the water district.
An Odd Alliance Against Las Vegas
In their opposition to Las Vegas, the state's ranchers and farmers have found themselves in an odd alliance with their traditional foes, environmentalists and Federal agencies. The state water engineer, R. Michael Turnipseed, who must approve the Las Vegas proposal, has received more than 3,600 protests from groups and individuals, including the National Park Service, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians and the Sierra Club.
Federal officials say the plan could endanger the Ash Meadows, Moapa Valley, Desert and Pahranagat Lakes national wildlife refuges, as well as the fragile life that clings to the 364 springs in Death Valley National Monument 125 miles away in California.
Paced by migrants from California and the East drawn by its desert climate and low prices, Clark County's population grew by an astonishing 62 percent between the 1980 and 1990 censuses, to 741,459 from 463,087. The newcomers have been wooed to this desert valley, which had only two inches of rain all last year, with water. Until they were halted by a recent new law, developers used drinking water to build artificial lakes for new communities with names like The Lakes, Desert Shores and Lake Las Vegas, a resort with a 320-acre lake planned near Henderson that was approved before the moratorium. Seven miles west of the famed Strip, The Lakes development has a 30-acre lake, where residents of million-dollar homes even have a sailing club.
Torrents of Waste Flow Into Gutters
Sprinklers send small rivers of water into the gutters daily all over Las Vegas. Acres of grass surround the new Citicorp Nevada building, a credit-card processing operation, on West Sahara Avenue. Huge sprinklers spray water during hot daylight hours into the air and, on a recent windy day, thousands of gallons drained into the streets. When questioned, Citicorp officials said they planned to replace half the lawn with desert plants soon.
Water is also the illusion that helps draw 20.3 million tourists a year to the gambling strip. The new $611 million Mirage Hotel, which describes itself as a "South Seas oasis," is set behind a 4.5-acre lagoon with 54-foot waterfalls and has a 1.3 million-gallon pool for its dolphins and a 20,000-gallon aquarium with more than 1,000 fish just behind the registration desk.
If it seems like water is wasted here, that is because it is dirt cheap. Until November, the district charged only 73 cents for 1,000 gallons. Last November, rates went up to 91 cents for the first 1,500 gallons a day and $1.01 above that, but even so water remains a huge bargain, less than a third of the $3.23 per 1,000 paid in Los Angeles. Southern Nevada gets 80 percent of its water from Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Seven states draw water from the river, and this region's allotment of 300,000 acre-feet a year will be used up by 1995. (An acre-foot, 325,850 gallons, is about enough to supply two typical families for a year.) By achieving 20 percent conservation and returning treated effluent to Lake Mead, Ms. Mulroy of the water district said the region could get to the year 2006 -- but no further -- if present projections for population growth hold true.
The district has enraged rural Nevadans by applying to drill 146 wells in 28 basins in four counties, some nearly 300 miles away from Las Vegas. The district applied for 840,000 acre-feet a year, but says now it really expects about 200,000 acre-feet, enough to permit Las Vegas and its suburbs to double in population by the year 2030. Under Nevada law, unused water belongs to the state, and it can be appropriated by any party that can put it to "beneficial use." The district has at least 20 years to demonstrate that it can use the claimed water before losing it, meaning that others cannot take the water in the meantime.
"The growth of rural Nevada is dead now because of Las Vegas," said Richard L. Carver, a rancher in the Smoky Valley about 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Mr. Carver is also a Nye County Commissioner. He said Nye, with only about 17,000 people, was poised to develop industry and recreational businesses because of its proximity to California, but could not do so without adequate water.
Nightmare Images Of Growing City
Further, he said, Las Vegas is plagued with intensifying urban problems of smog, traffic, drug gangs and the like. "How are they going to clean up and bring in another million people?" he asked. "Nobody in Las Vegas wants growth except the county commissioners and the gaming industry."
Ranchers and farmers across a vast region fear that the pumping will lower the water table. They say they have husbanded a precious resource for years and are appalled at the waste they see in Las Vegas. Hank H. Records, for one, homesteaded the Amargosa Valley 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas 41 years ago. Though Las Vegas has proposed no wells in the water-rich valley, geological studies show that water flows toward it through the aquifer into which the wells would be drilled.
"This is our livelihood," Mr. Records, now 73, said as he looked out over the flat valley toward the Funeral Mountains in California. "Why don't they stop those golf courses before they stop our fields of green?" he said. "Let them conserve a little bit."
Mr. Bradhurst, the Nye County consultant, said Las Vegas's contention that it needed the water to maintain the gaming and tourist industry was specious because only 8 percent of its water went to casinos and hotels. Well over 60 percent, he said, goes to watering lawns and golf courses. "So there is not a lot of water used to support people who gamble," Mr. Bradhurst said, adding that he thought Clark County wanted to create a "dead zone" around it.
Two Wests Collide: The Old and New
Ms. Mulroy said that Las Vegas intended to harvest only a "safe yield" of perennial water -- meaning water that is replenished through rain and snow annually -- and that it intended to give some of it to the rural counties to help them develop. "They do not want that opportunity," she said. "They want to maintain a rural life style. This is forcing rural Nevada to address an issue they never wanted to address. We have a colliding of the new and old West."
She pointed to figures showing that agriculture uses 90.3 percent of water but produced only 6,010 jobs and $168 million in revenue per year, while the remainder of the economy, mainly tourism and gaming, used 9.7 percent of available water and produced 547,100 jobs and $19.4 billion in revenue. "We are not asking for it all; we are not touching the 90 percent," she said. Gaming and tourism, she went on, provide half the state Government's income, relieving Nevadans of paying income taxes and other burdensome levies. "They are biting that hand that feeds them," she said of the rural counties.
Stephen A. Wynn, chairman of the board of Golden Nugget Inc., which owns the Mirage Hotel, said this one hotel, with 7,200 employees, generated a larger payroll, $180 million a year, than all the ranching and farming in Nevada. Water, he said, provided the essential "tension" between fantasy and reality that made Las Vegas what it is. He said any restrictions that slowed hotel building would "put an imaginative damper on the future of the place."
It is 125 miles from the watery glitter of the Strip to Death Valley in California. The park lies at the southern end of the vast aquifer under Southern Nevada, whose waters generally flow south. While studies are not conclusive, the park's superintendent, Edwin L. Rothfuss, said he feared that if Las Vegas tapped the aquifer, water would stop flowing out of the springs there.
Will Death Valley Live Up to Name?
Mel Essington, a park service geologist, took a visitor to Naverres Springs, a typical oasis in the searing valley. For about 200 feet, a trickle of water fills a narrow wash, supporting a vast array of desert life -- native palms, sage, arrow weed, bighorn sheep, bobcats and reptiles. "The situation is roughly analogous to a bathtub," he said. "You remove only a small amount of water, and it no longer flows over the edge."
Just across the border in Nevada is the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, where numerous seeps support 26 plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, including such endangered species as the Ash Meadows speckled dace, a fish, and the Devil's Hole pupfish, an inch-long fish whose entire population is found in one water hole. It is protected by a 1976 ruling by the United States Supreme Court. Douglas L. Threloff, a biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, called it the "American version of the Galapagos Islands," an irreplacable laboratory for the study of evolution in harsh environments.
Ms. Mulroy said the district would stop pumping if it caused any environmental damage to Federal lands. But Federal officials, asking for an environmental impact study, have asked the state water engineer to postpone making a decision on the Las Vegas request for 18 months. If he does not grant the delay requested by the Federal officials, he is expected to hold hearings later this year before making a decision.