A group of White Pine County residents and conservationists are suing for the right to participate in upcoming state hearings on a $2 billion plan to pipe groundwater to Las Vegas from across Eastern Nevada.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in Ely includes 54 plaintiffs, most of them residents or property owners in White Pine County and neighboring Utah. The Great Basin Water Network and the national environmental group Defenders of Wildlife also have joined the lawsuit.

At issue is a July 27 decision by the state's chief water regulator, who declined to reopen the protest period for dozens of groundwater applications filed by the Las Vegas Valley Water District 16 years ago.

State Engineer Tracy Taylor said he simply was following state law, which limits the protest period to 30 days after an application is filed.

In 1989, the Las Vegas Valley Water District filed 147 applications for water rights in rural Clark, Lincoln, Nye and White Pine counties. The applications drew almost 275 protests, but no new protesting parties have been allowed to join in since then.

"The irony is the fact that the Southern Nevada Water Authority didn't even exist 16 years ago. It wasn't even a concept 16 years ago," said Bob Fulkerson, state director for Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, which is supporting the lawsuit but is not a plaintiff.

The water authority was formed in 1991 and took over the water district's applications for rural groundwater in 1993.

Starting Sept. 11, Taylor will convene a three-week hearing in Carson City on 19 of those applications. The hearing will decide how much groundwater, if any, the authority should be allowed to take from Spring Valley, a 1 million-acre watershed in southern White Pine County, 250 miles north of Las Vegas.

Matt Kenna is an attorney for the Oregon-based Western Environmental Law Center, which represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. He said they are not seeking to block or delay next month's hearing, but they do hope to win the right to participate in future hearings on the authority's applications in neighboring Snake Valley and elsewhere.

"The Spring Valley hearing is going to go forward without this being resolved," Kenna said.

The list of plaintiffs includes the family members of several people who have died since they protested the original applications 16 years ago.

Kenna described those plaintiffs as "heirs" and said their exclusion by the state engineer was "particularly egregious."

Jo Anne Garrett is a 35-year resident of Snake Valley and one of the original protesters of Southern Nevada's water filings in White Pine County. Though she isn't a plaintiff, she said she fully supports the lawsuit.

"It's grossly unfair for people to be deprived of participating for no good reason at all," Garrett said.