Earlier this month, Henry Brean described Pat Mulroy’s bold proposal:

The general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority said now may be the time to take a serious look at a decades-old idea of capturing floodwater from the Mississippi River and using it to recharge the massive groundwater aquifer beneath the Central Plains.

In terms of jobs and investment, the project would dwarf the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams, and some believe it could secure the future water supply for a vast swath of the Midwest and West, including Nevada and six other states that share the Colorado River….

It … could set off a daisy chain of smaller water projects and exchanges from east to west, allowing residents in Denver and farmers across the eastern flank of the Rockies to relinquish the water they currently pump across the Continental Divide. That in turn would leave more water for the Colorado River.

Short of dismantling the sprawling cities and massive economies that now dot the arid West, Mulroy said the only way to save the Colorado is to find more water to fill it.

One of the problems with courts deciding important political or policy questions on procedural grounds is that the substantive issues remain unresolved. Instead, we get more process. Such, it seems, is the case with today’s decision by the Nevada Supreme Court to invalidate Las Vegas’s applications for rights to fill its urban pipeline with rural Nevada groundwater.

Las Vegas Nevada, courtesy Matze Ott, licensed under Creative Commons

For now, as Emily Green reports, Vegas’s yet-to-be-built pipeline is without water:

In an unanimous decision, the Nevada Supreme Court decided that the State Engineer violated the due process rights of hundreds, if not thousands, of people in target valleys across the Great Basin who had long protested the pipeline and water withdrawals.

This is clearly a setback for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Las Vegas’s water wholesaler and the government agency that hopes to build the pipeline. So what happens now?

It its statement (thanks to Emily for posting), SNWA suggests that the next steps are unclear:

The Nevada Supreme Court ruling remanded to District Court the decision as to whether the Nevada State Engineer will simply need to re-notice the applications in order to allow additional protestants to participate—which appears to have been the ruling’s underlying intent—or whether the applications must be re-filed.

Meanwhile the AP is reporting that SNWA immediately refiled the groundwater applications. Either way, what we’ve got here is more process, rather than a resolution of the underlying question of whether moving large quantities of water from one watershed to another is an appropriate approach to meeting our long term water needs here in the west.

Reading slides from a presentation by Colorado River Water Conservation District general counsel Peter Fleming, I ran across a rule of thumb governing water politics there, the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the water is west of the continental divide, and 20 percent is east. For population, the numbers are reversed.

This seems a useful insight.

You know you’ve reached a milestone in a western water war of words when the aggrieved party invokes the name of William Mulholland. Such is the case today in discussions over a proposal to pipe a gobzillion acre feet of water across the continental divide to the growing cities in Colorado’s front range. And it’s Utah that’s playing the Mulholland card.

William Mulholland was the engineering giant who brought Los Angeles its water. That’s what you did a hundred years ago when you were an engineering giant. But the water had to come from somewhere, and the legacy of the places Mulholland dried up, especially the Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevada, have become both the icon and reality against which all big western water projects are now measured. As the Salt Lake Tribune does in this editorial discussing the Colorado-Front Range pipeline proposal:

It’s a scheme worthy of William Mulholland, the engineer who ravaged Southern California water resources for the City of Los Angeles early in the 20th century. But today such thinking is outdated, or at least it should be. One reason is that everyone has seen the environmental devastation in the Owens Valley and elsewhere created by Mulholland’s projects and others like it.

This is an important argument on a couple of levels. The first what is essentially an argument against out-of-basin transfers. That is the wonkish water policy principle invoked by the Owens Valley references. The second, and perhaps more important, level, is the question of who is making the argument: Utah, or at least one of its important public voices in the form of the editorial page of one of the state’s major newspapers. Utah and Colorado are siblings in the western water family by virtue of sharing an Upper Colorado Basin allotment under the 1922 Colorado Compact.

Does this suggest the siblings are squabbling?

(picture postcard of Lake Hollywood on Mulholland Drive in LA, courtesy Loyola Marymount University Library/Calisphere)

From the work blog, a quick look at how the Storms of the Decade have been playing out in terms of western snowpack. In short: it’s raining like hell where all the people live, but the upper Colorado Basin, which feeds Lake Powell, has been pretty much left out with the exception of a blast of snow in the San Juans.