Editorial

Transfer of water from non-connected basins has long been troubling for farmers and fisheries managers in the West. Last week, Utah appeared ready to write another chapter in Las Vegas' reach for every drop of water that can legally be squeezed from rocky aquifers beneath the Snake River Valley in far western Utah.

It's a deal that once again raises the question of how far one can reach for out-of-basin water transfers. Unfortunately, this complex water raid has been going on so long and is being played out in arid rural country where folks are just plain worn out by the persistent push of politically connected Las Vegas boosters.

For a sampling of what worried residents think, one has only to go back to 2006 when the Nevada state engineer held hearings on in-state groundwater rights requested to supply a big pipe reaching northeast from Las Vegas. Over 4,000 written protests went into the record. The engineer, however, ended up granting over 114,000 acre-feet a year of ground water pumping rights to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

That wasn't enough for the Las Vegas plan, facing fierce resistance over the border in the Snake Valley. So, with the help of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the authority went to Washington, D.C., to force Utah to the negotiating table. Apparently members of Congress didn't want to ask the question of "how far do you reach." The interstate pact before Utah's governor is mandated by federal law. Word from the statehouse is that he believes it's better to secure rights for existing ranches than to let this thing drag on.

This is a grand plan that's been in the works so long that what was once a $2 billion deal inflated to $3.5 billion. The notion, first floated in 1989 by Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the authority and Las Vegas Water District, is that folks moving to Vegas will someday soon use up a municipal water supply secured by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Colorado River Project.

We're talking a 300-mile pipeline with one branch reaching across the state line into Utah farm country.

The water compact Utah officials last week signaled they're ready to sign splits 108,000 acre-feet a year of groundwater production beneath the valley. Some 35,000 acre-feet is covered by current ranch well permits in Utah, another 12,000 acre-feet to existing Nevada ranches. The Nevada water agency gets rights to 35,000 acre-feet. A federal wildlife refuge and potential new water development make up the balance of compact allocations.

The history of interstate water compacts in the West is usually that both states agree, put the terms into state law, and pass the result to Congress where the federal government becomes a third party to the deal. The Utah-Nevada deal started out backwards when Reid brought it to Congress in 2004.

That said, it's time for users of Western water -- including advocates for fish and waterfowl -- to ask the policy question. We don't need another upside-down deal that could have unintended ecological consequences and leave rural communities in economic ruin decades later.

That, if you recall, was the story of California's Owens Valley, which was drained to slake the thirst of Los Angeles. Only now is it returning to some semblance of productivity after Metropolitan Water District agreed in 1998 to forego some of its diversions from the distant basin.