Nevada: Lawyers eye looming water wars
March 6, 2009 by Editor
Filed under The Southwest
RENO — As the specter of climate change looms ever closer, it has become more likely that Southern Nevada municipalities will have to fight for their lives — and those fights will be over water.
Municipal and regional water managers are recruiting an army of lawyers and preparing to go to war for resources. At stake is the West’s main water supply — a sum of water that most climate models expect to shrink as greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb and the temperatures of the Earth’s surface and seas rise.
And some battles have already begun.
CLE International, a company that prepares continuing legal education sessions for lawyers across the country, held a session Feb. 26-27 in Reno to share with water lawyers, water managers and concerned citizens the latest laws, strategies and problems facing Nevada and the West.
Nevada is home to numerous disputes over who owns and who should own the water in more than 230 hydrologic basins, water managers at the event said.
In Northern Nevada, locals are hammering out agreements that would protect property owners’ water rights while allowing rivers to run freely.
Negotiations on some of these water allotments have been going on for decades.
At the same time, ranchers and environmentalists are fighting the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s plan to pump hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water it has acquired rights to out of rural eastern Nevada and pipe it hundreds of miles to Las Vegas.
On both sides are those battling to preserve a way of life for local residents — ranchers need water for cows, sheep and their fodder; environmentalists are trying to save animals and wild lands and the Water Authority is trying to save the Las Vegas Valley from the threat of doom should its measly portion of the Colorado River peter out.
There are more than a dozen bill draft requests in the Nevada Legislature proposing changes to water law.
Nowhere in the West is water such a key issue as in Las Vegas.
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Source: Las Vegas Sun
I tend to agree. We need law. And therefore we need lawyers. But doesn’t this get to a point where it is just over the top. The lawyers then start to spend hundreds of meetings just to drive up their billable hours. Are they really adding value here?