What Happens In Vegas?

Dean Baker’s cowboy hat looks suspiciously clean. The 66-year-old sun-worn Nevada rancher usually wears a dusty cap, but today he’s got on a pristine white Stetson, the same one he wore for a French news crew. With their cameras rolling, Baker jumped onto a horse and galloped into the sunset. “They love the whole ‘wild west’ thing over there,” he says. Baker can dress the part, but he’s no yokel. He and his three sons, all college-educated, are among the most successful independent ranchers in the state. In sparsely populated White Pine County, nearly 250 miles from Las Vegas along the Utah/Nevada border, cattle and crop sales earn them about $2 million a year. According to Baker, they could do even better. He points to his cows grazing in lush meadows, irrigated with well water from the ground below. The meadows stand in stark contrast to the scrubby, flat desert plains just beyond. “If there was enough water,” he says, “there could be green fields across this valley.”

But there isn’t enough water. Las Vegas is the fastest-growing metro area in the country, adding 70,000 residents a year. It is also the driest, receiving about four inches of rainfall annually. If a handful of Las Vegas officials push through an aggressive plan this year to tap aquifers deep below White Pine County, ranches like Baker’s could literally dry up and blow away. In 2003, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) announced a plan that its director, Patricia Mulroy, once scoffed at: pump 58 billion gallons of water from aquifers in the rural north (enough to supply 600,000 Las Vegas households for a year). The multi-billion-dollar project would be the largest farms-to-city groundwater transfer in the country’s history, and the controversy surrounding it has pitted ranchers, scientists, and environmentalists against powerful politicians, business interests, and developers. If SNWA gets more access to water, according to Mulroy, Las Vegas will become part of the burgeoning “New Urban West.” If the agency gets nothing - and doesn’t find additional water - Las Vegas will run dry by around 2015.

A REAL CITY

Locking horns over water is a tradition out west. The roots of Nevada’s current water battles go back over 80 years. In 1922, seven states started divvying up shares of Colorado River water. At the time, Las Vegas was a hardscrabble railroad town with about 2,300 residents. By comparison, southern California was booming. Real estate brochures promising a sun-drenched utopia on the Pacific Ocean lured new residents to Los Angeles en masse. Not surprisingly, California secured a 58 percent share of the river’s water under the now increasingly controversial Colorado River Compact. Nevada got roughly 4 percent. Today, that’s barely enough to meet the needs of Las Vegas for a year.

Over the next few decades, Nevada started catching up to its neighbor. Between 1930 and 1990, the Las Vegas area population grew from 5,165 people to almost 800,000. Then in 1989, the first modern luxury hotel on the strip, MGM’s Mirage, opened its doors. Tourism profits soared in the 1990s as larger and pricier hotels, trendy cuisine, and Broadway-caliber stage productions replaced the tired buffets and aging casinos of previous decades. The expansion led to more gaming jobs - a main driver behind the population explosion.

Since the boom of the ‘90s, the steady flow of cash from gaming activities (last year, around $681 million) means no one in the state of Nevada pays business or personal income taxes - a big lure for newcomers. The U.S. Census Bureau found that, between 1995 and 2000, Las Vegas ranked second among all U.S. cities as the place young, single, college-educated people moved to. Vegas has also posted the highest job growth figures of any metropolitan area for the past decade. More and more people are working outside the gaming industry, says Somer Hollingsworth, president and CEO of the non-profit Nevada Development Authority. The NDA and other economic development groups are trying to diversify the city’s economy by attracting tech, biotech, and telecommunications firms from around the country. One initial success is the private Nevada Cancer Institute, which opened a 142,000-square-foot research center in 2005 that now employs 250 people.

As the population of Las Vegas doubled between 1995 and 2006, from 1 to 2 million people, a record-breaking construction boom has churned out a matching supply of inexpensive homes. At the farthest edges of the Las Vegas Valley, subdivisions meet the open desert. Stacks of piping and piles of dirt mark the flattened landscape in an ever-expanding ring of homes and gigantic master-planned communities around the city. As of February 2007, the metropolitan area had 543 new subdivisions actively selling homes.

Once people settle in, city boosters say, the lifestyle is hard to beat. “Las Vegans are a can-do people,” says Hollingsworth of NDA. “The past almost doesn’t exist here because we blow it up or tear it down.” The allure becomes irresistible once you factor in the fantastic weather and the official approval to drop your inhibitions the moment you arrive (“What happens here, stays here”). Even sophisticated culture-lovers will soon have options: by 2011, Vegas will open a $250 million downtown arts center with new facilities for the Las Vegas Ballet Theater and the Nevada Philharmonic. It’s proof, says Hollingsworth, that Las Vegas is a “real city.” But in the desert, what a growing city (real or otherwise) needs is water.

A CHARMING BATTLE

German-born Patricia Mulroy is head of the agency tasked with finding it. Now 53, she arrived in Las Vegas as a college student in the 1970s. She left briefly to pursue a doctorate in German literature at Stanford University, but returned in 1978. Charging up the Clark County political ladder, she became deputy general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD) by 1985 - despite having almost no experience with water issues. In 1989, she took control of the organization, and in 1991, while running the LVVWD, she brought multiple southern Nevada water districts together under a new umbrella organization: SNWA. To do so, she negotiated an end to long-standing, bitter disputes over water resources in the region. It paid off: the districts began working together more efficiently and saving water (prior to this, because of an antiquated allotment rule, cities had been opening hydrants and letting water run down the streets just to prove they had used their share). Mulroy became SNWA’s chief and a political powerhouse.

In 2002, Mulroy, whose close-cropped hair, deep tan, and stern expressions fit her “tough gal” reputation, jumped into a higher-stakes game. SNWA made an unsolicited $3.2 billion bid to purchase the Nevada Power Company. Mulroy decided the cash-strapped organization couldn’t handle SNWA’s energy demands for new pumps and filtration facilities. A stormy public feud erupted between Mulroy and the head of the power company, Walter Higgins. In a 2002 Las Vegas Sun article, Mulroy said the scuffle with Higgins was “a charming battle, and I’m enjoying it thoroughly.” Three years later, at a press conference to announce a power-sharing agreement, a beaming Mulroy planted a congratulatory kiss on Higgins’s cheek. (That behavior doesn’t surprise Michael Cohen, an expert on Western water policy at the Oakland, California-based Pacific Institute. “Pat has a tendency to make elaborate statements, throw her notebooks on the desk and storm out. But she eventually comes back to the table and comes to some new agreement.”)

But bigger problems loomed. The 1990s were a relatively wet decade: above-average snow melts in the Sierra Nevadas kept Lake Mead, the reservoir supplying 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water, filled to the brim. Never one to mince words, in 1994, Mulroy told the High Country News, a Western environmental magazine, that piping water to Vegas from the rural north was the “singularly most stupid idea anyone’s ever had.” But by 2002, a severe drought had singed the Sun Belt for a third consecutive year. Lake Mead had sunk 60 feet in three years, to its lowest level since 1972. (The lake forms where the Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado River.) The reservoir has sunk an additional 48 feet since and is down to 55 percent capacity today, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado River office. “Computer models in the 1990s predicted a zero percent chance of anything like that happening,” Mulroy says with annoyance. “So a project that I easily called ‘stupid’ in 1994 is far from stupid in 2006.”

The water crisis now facing Las Vegas is dire. In dwindling Lake Mead, rocks that were completely submerged for decades are now glinting in the desert sun. “We believed, as everyone did, that because of the vastness of the Colorado River System, we had managed to engineer our way around the whimsical nature of the climate in the west,” Pat Mulroy said in an interview this summer. “And guess what? We hadn’t. It doesn’t work. And so, you have to diversify where this water comes from.”

Mulroy and SNWA can now try to connect Las Vegas to the only area in the state that has any groundwater left - the rural north - via 235 miles of buried pipeline (the grand plan she announced in 2003). Or, an even bigger gamble, they can try to increase Nevada’s share of river water by mounting a legal challenge to the Colorado River Compact of 1922.

THE WATER GRAB

The problem with the first plan is that accessing northern aquifers requires getting access to the land above them. SNWA has had some success acquiring property owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (the state is 87 percent federally owned), but limited success purchasing agricultural lands. For some ranchers, the lure of multi-million dollar payouts from SNWA has proved difficult to resist. But White Pine County resident Gary Perea says a resounding majority of area residents are against the “water grab.” Rancher Dean Baker is one of them. He owns around 10,000 acres in White Pine County, and the BLM loans him an additional 250,000 for cattle grazing. “I could have asked SNWA for $100 million and they wouldn’t have laughed. They wouldn’t pay us that much but they wouldn’t have laughed,” he says. “It would have been the starting point for negotiations. But, my three sons and I sat down and talked it over. All of us agreed: we don’t care about the money. We like it here.”

But Hal Rothman, a professor of history at UNLV, believes supporters of agriculture only hurt the state by battling destiny: the rapid, unbounded urbanization of the West. In a 2001 article, Rothman reported that in 1990, although the farming sector only generated 2 percent of the state’s income, it consumed 80 percent of the state’s water. Nor does agriculture have any ancillary benefit for tourism, he argues: nobody comes to Nevada to see farms. In his 2002 book Neon Metropolis, Rothman writes that “Nevada would dearly miss the MGM if it couldn’t get enough water, but if all of Nevada’s agriculture and ranching dried up and blew away, urban Nevada might not notice for years.”

Perea, who owns a small inn near the Nevada/Utah border, says the shadow of history repeating itself hangs over the farmers’ decisions to sell out. At a picnic table outside his inn’s tiny concrete-floored casino, speaking over the staccato dinging of a few slot machines, the 38-year old recounted the history of the Owens Valley water disaster: in the early 20th Century, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) built a 230-mile-long gravity-powered aqueduct to bring water from California’s Owens Valley in the High Sierras to Los Angeles, where it would fuel that region’s growth. On November 5, 1913, 40,000 people gathered in the San Fernando Valley to celebrate as the first drops of water arrived from the mountains. But the project, by the mid-1920s, had sucked Owens Valley dry, turning once-verdant fields into dust.

Pat Mulroy finds such comparisons ridiculous. “Owens Valley was a time and place when this country had no environmental ethic and no environmental laws. Those days are gone,” she insists. But White Pine County residents, environmentalists, and others have filed protests and staged rallies; they believe the SNWA plan could decimate flora and fauna by sinking the water table in Snake Valley (where the Baker ranch sits) and the adjacent Spring Valley. Jon Sjцberg, a Nevada Department of Wildlife biologist, says eastern Nevada’s isolated salt-water springs are home to an exceptional range of fish, snails, and amphibians. A sinking water table would be “catastrophic for the species involved.”

The opposition groups have publicized hydrological studies demonstrating severe negative impacts of the proposed pumping. In a hearing last fall, SNWA refused to produce a computer model the agency created to predict what pumping would do to water levels in the valleys. According to Mulroy, the data was insufficient: “Until there are test wells drilled and the system is stressed, there’s no way to know for sure what the impact will be,” she says. But Dr. Paula Cutillo, a hydrologist at the National Park Service, ran SNWA’s model herself. The results confirm what Roger Congdon, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also found: that pumping from the aquifers in the north will significantly draw down groundwater levels - approximately 200 feet over a 75-year period, according to Cutillo.

“It’s hard for decision-makers to deal with the uncertainty,” says Cutillo. “But these models are the best tools you can use to make well-informed decisions. They’re all good representations of the system.” Mulroy testified during hearings that SNWA would closely monitor the pumps’ effects in order to mitigate harm to the environment. Matt Kenna, lead attorney for the coalition of groups opposing SNWA’s rural water plan, believes this is a backward approach. “They’re basically saying, ‘Grant us the water, let us build a pipeline, and [then] we’ll tell you what the impacts are.’ It doesn’t make sense.”

Meanwhile, SNWA’s second option - fighting for a bigger share of the Colorado River - is equally fraught. Re-negotiating an 80-year-old federal agreement between seven states would be an onerous task, requiring approval from the U.S. Supreme Court and two-thirds of Congress. According to some, Mulroy seems willing to take such drastic measures. Michael Cohen of the Pacific Institute says she has “been quite aggressive in saying that if [the other Colorado River Compact states] don’t protect Las Vegas from a shortage, then she’s going to force Congress to reopen the Compact. Whether that’s bluster or not, it’s hard to know. There have been a lot of threats flying back and forth.”

The trouble is, Nevada’s neighbors are growing quickly too. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Arizona beat out Nevada as the fastest growing state in 2006. And under a 2002 federal agreement, California was forced to cut down on its use of Colorado River water despite its own rapidly expanding population in the south. Mulroy’s counterpart at the Arizona Department of Water Resources, Herb Guenther, was quick to draw a line in the sand between Nevada and increased access to the Colorado: “It’s going to be a very cold day in Phoenix before we do that,” he says.

CONTROLLING ITS OWN DESTINY

A single Nevada official - State Engineer Tracy Taylor, the governor’s appointed arbiter of Nevada water rights - will decide the fate of SNWA’s groundwater proposal over the next two years as various phases of the plan undergo hearings. (The Bureau of Land Management must also grant permission for piping and power lines to run over federally-owned lands). If Taylor approves the entire plan, up to 195 proposed pumps would inject 135 miles of lateral piping with water from the desert aquifers. These branches would connect to a 235-mile-long trunk pipeline buried next to Route 93. Beneath the vast stretches of creosote and cactus that flank the two-lane highway, the water would flow south to Vegas’s sun-soaked seniors, slot-machine queens, and hordes of tourists.

In September 2006, both sides argued their cases before Taylor in Carson City. During his closing argument, SNWA’s attorney, Paul Taggart, said the ultimate question is “whether Nevada is going to control its own destiny” by using instate water or find itself at the mercy of other states to assist. SNWA is, in fact, already exploring a variety of back-up plans and alternatives, including agreements with other states. They are considering offering cash rewards for innovative conservation measures and paying farmers to let their land lie fallow. Other ideas include manipulating the weather through cloud seeding or building desalinization plants to extract potable water from the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean.

But Mulroy fears none of these measures will happen fast enough, so she’s not backing down on SNWA’s groundwater plan. “My first obligation is to protect the health and safety of almost well over 2 million residents and soon to be 3 million residents in southern Nevada,” she testified at a September hearing. “It will not matter that we have a bank in Arizona,” she said, referring to an emergency backup system in which Las Vegas pays the state of Arizona to store water it can access during a severe drought. “If Lake Mead is empty and if the Secretary [of the Interior] has cut everybody back, there is no way that we will be able to… deliver those resources to our customers. They will disappear.”

Of course, the lingering question is, could Vegas end its water problems and avoid relying on other states simply by becoming more efficient? A 2006 report by the non-profit Western Resource Advocates found that Las Vegas uses 60 percent more water per capita than nearby Tucson, which has encouraged water conservation by, among other things, raising rates for customers. In 2006, the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) determined that Las Vegas could save 153,000 acre-feet (50 billion gallons) of water per year simply by encouraging conservation measures like installing efficient faucets, toilets, and washers in all new homes and not watering lawns. “First of all, I appreciate and respect - with gratitude - that Las Vegas is the economic engine that drives the train in Nevada,” says Bob Fulkerson of PLAN. “Second, the city has the right to grow. But, it’s one of the most wasteful water cities in the Southwest.”

Mulroy says raising water rates and pushing aggressive conservation is politically impossible in Vegas, partly due to the ingrained culture of waste. “We’ve had the luxury to let water run down the streets, and quite frankly, it’s created a mindset that it’s something you take for granted,” she says. Case in point: 70 percent of Las Vegas’s water is still being used for outdoor watering.

Fulkerson says it would help if Vegas officials were genuinely interested in promoting water conservation measures or tying new construction to available water supplies. But he’s skeptical that this will happen anytime soon. “Slowing down growth in Las Vegas is damn near impossible,” he says. “You could no more do it than stop an oncoming train.”

SPRAWLING OUT OF CONTROL

In an era of hyper-growth, local agencies in the state are often overburdened, and some obligations have slipped through the cracks. Since 2002, according to the Nevada Department of Transportation, traffic has more than doubled on a stretch of Blue Diamond Road (Route 160), a state highway running west from the downtown Vegas Strip. About ten miles out, the road passes Mountain’s Edge, a master-planned community with some 12,000 upscale McMansion-style homes, many on quarter-acre lots. Shortly after construction there began in 2004, the developer, Focus Properties, paid for extra traffic lights and road-widening on Blue Diamond Road to accommodate the new drivers. But the Nevada DOT, swamped with requests, failed to make the road improvements fast enough. The results were deadly: according to the Nevada Highway Patrol, there were 14 fatalities on Blue Diamond Road in 2004, 16 fatalities in 2005, and 19 deaths in 2006.

Heather Fisher lives near Route 160. After a road accident killed her friend, a police officer, she led a public campaign to demand infrastructure improvements. “The Planning Commission, they just approve development regardless of the consequences,” she says. “They could have said, ‘Mountain’s Edge, you’re approved contingent upon building this highway first.’ But they built all the houses first, put all the people in there, and then the people had nowhere to go and it clogged up the road.”

Focus Properties said in a statement that “keeping up with infrastructure improvements is an issue every city faces when it grows at the pace of the Las Vegas Valley. We are working hand in hand with Clark County and the Nevada Department of Transportation to formulate and implement the required solutions.” Fisher acknowledges that it has gotten safer since last March, when the state lowered the speed limit from 65 to 45. “It took a lot of deaths before they ever put a stoplight in,” she says.

Suzan Hudson, a 51-year-old grandmother living in the area, drew media attention last year by putting up crosses at the sites of traffic deaths on Blue Diamond Road. Hudson didn’t put up crosses for accidents. “Just the fatalities,” she says. “I’d still be out there if I’d done the accidents.”

POLITICS, POLITICS

A few Las Vegas politicians are at least talking about the water shortage seriously. This includes Rory Reid, a 44-year-old Democrat who is the son of U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid. The elder Reid has represented his state in the senate for twenty years. Rory Reid is a commissioner in Clark County, where most of Las Vegas sits. “We need to manage our growth properly, and then we need to diversify our water portfolio. They’re not enemies, one or the other,” Rory Reid says. “I don’t think that anybody wants to protect southern Nevadans to the ruination of the environment in the north.” In 2004, when Vegas residents were under orders to conserve water because of a drought, a poll commissioned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal found that 75 percent of county residents supported SNWA in limiting water permits for new construction until drought restrictions were lifted.

But no such restrictions have been put into place, and the powerful pro-growth, pro-development contingent in Vegas - including casino developers, home builders, and union leaders - continues with ambitious, large-scale projects. Last fall Clark County commissioners dredged up an arcane water law that helped Harvey Whittemore, the state’s most powerful and well-known casino industry lobbyist-turned-developer, go forward with his plan to build more than 150,000 homes in a master-planned community 50 miles north of Las Vegas. “Developers go in and gobble up the land, and there’s no room to put in schools or large enough parks. It’s just mind-boggling how much power they have in our community,” says a member of the Clark County Parks Commission, who asked to remain anonymous. Bob Fulkerson, director of PLAN (Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada), says there is a certain laissez-faire attitude on the part of Las Vegas planning authorities. “For the most part, developers get everything they want and everything they ask for and some things they don’t ask for.”