Elko Daily Free Press 6-18-10

High court flushes water rights ruling

LAS VEGAS — Proponents and opponents of a multibillion-dollar water pipeline from northeastern Nevada to Las Vegas said Friday they welcomed a Nevada Supreme Court ruling that lifted a cloud over water rights in the state.

In a unanimous opinion, the court withdrew an earlier decision and said the state’s top water official should reopen the review of Las Vegas Valley Water District applications to pump groundwater from five rural valleys. The applications for water rights dating back to 1989 won’t have to be refiled.

“We withdraw our January 28, 2010, opinion and issue this opinion in its place,” Justice James Hardesty wrote.

The decision, issued Thursday, said the court was seeking an “equitable remedy” for confusion stemming from a unanimous ruling five months ago. The January ruling invalidated water rights applications by the Las Vegas-based water authority in faraway rural valleys.

The court ruled that Nevada law required the state engineer to have acted on the water rights applications within a year. Instead, they weren’t considered until 16 years later, after many people who initially filed protests either died or moved away.

Other people who later moved into affected areas were unaware of the applications. Still others, like conservation groups, were denied standing by the state engineer to participate in application hearings.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which holds the Las Vegas Valley Water District applications, issued a statement calling Thursday’s ruling fair because it allows pipeline opponents “to have their voices heard without turning 100 years of water law on its ear.”

The court ruling in January triggered a wave of legal uncertainty about the validity of long-held water rights if they also had not been acted upon by the state engineer within a year.

Water authority chief Pat Mulroy noted in the statement that officials are trying to find new water sources for a region now home to almost 2 million people served by a shrinking water supply in drought-stricken Lake Mead, the Colorado River reservoir behind Hoover Dam.

“We need to get all of the necessary permits in place so we can be ready to draw upon this available water resource if conditions warrant,” Mulroy said in the statement. “This ruling puts us back on track.”

Simeon Herskovits, an El Prado, N.M.-based lawyer for the Great Basin Water Network, said the ruling was fair because it would let “more of the interested public who either initially protested or never had an opportunity to protest be allowed to take part.”

The network is one of more than 50 organizational and individual appellants in the case. Herskovits said new hearings should shed new light on the way the Southern Nevada Water Authority handled applications before Nevada’s top water official, the state engineer.

“We feel they manipulated the process — delayed it at times and rushed it at times — and concealed evidence about potential impacts from pumping,” Herskovits said. “Now the SNWA and the state engineer have to go back to the start of the process.

At issue are 34 water rights applications in the Spring, Snake, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys near the Nevada-Utah line. The applications are crucial to the water authority’s $3.5 billion proposal to build a pipeline to White Pine County, more than 250 miles north of Las Vegas along the Utah state line. Officials say the project could supply enough water for almost 270,000 homes.

Utah residents and elected officials have raised concerns about the amount of water that would be drawn from an underground aquifer in the Snake Valley straddling the Nevada-Utah border.