Long and thoughtful story at the LA Timesregarding the city of Las Vegas and its impact on the surrounding land.
Las Vegas looks north to slake its thirst
Vegas' drinking problem is Nevada ranchers' headache as officials look to tap groundwater in rural counties to slake a thirst for growth.
When rancher Dean Baker and his three grown sons gathered for their regular 6:30 a.m. coffee klatch a few years ago, the topic went beyond the usual cow-calf talk. Should they fight or sell out?
Three hundred miles to the south, Las Vegas' determined water czar, Pat Mulroy, was laying ambitious plans to pump rural Nevada groundwater to her booming city of dancing casino fountains and new housing tracts.
One branch of the $2-billion-plus pipeline project would reach into the high desert valley straddling the Utah border where the Baker family has ranched for half a century.
As Baker remembers the family meeting, it didn't last long. "It was unanimous, without any question." They would fight.
Battles over water in the West are always about something more. At their most elemental, they are about survival. As Baker sees it, the Nevada water war threatens to reprise the unhappy scene in California's Owens Valley, which dried up decades ago after Los Angeles drained it.
And, like L.A.'s legendary water engineer, William Mulholland, Mulroy sees the distant water as the key to her city's future. The struggle pits a neon-lighted big city against scrub-crusted cattle country, a tart-tongued immigrant against a slow-talking third-generation rancher, a vision of the New West against the values of the old.
Mulroy is one of Nevada's most powerful public officials, a Democrat who is periodically mentioned as a potential gubernatorial candidate.
She is on a mission to make up for the historic slight her adopted state suffered when Colorado River flows were split among the seven basin states in the 1920s. At the time, Las Vegas was little more than a dusty railroad stop, so Nevada received the smallest river share in the lower basin. It is on that comparatively meager portion that the Las Vegas Valley relies for 90% of its water.
"The Nevada state engineer had no vision," Mulroy says, bristling at the long-ago snub. "And we're just going to accept that as our manifest destiny in a state where we're the economic hub?"
Population in Clark County (LV's home) has risen from under 797,142 in 1990 to around 2 Million and is projected to continue to rise. These people all need water and the proposal to pump it from an underground aquifer could potentially suck it dry for all the ranchers and the other towns in the valleys.
