CARSON CITY -- The state hearing hadn't even started yet on the Southern Nevada Water Authority's $2 billion pipeline to White Pine County, and already the comparison was being made.

All it took was three words on a bumper sticker: Remember Owens Valley.

But water authority officials insist their plans do not deserve to be lumped in with what is widely considered the most disastrous water exportation project in American history.

For one thing, they say, water managers are now subject to a host of environmental laws that didn't exist in the early 1900s, when Los Angeles water officials descended on the Owens Valley in search of water for their growing city. As a result of that ever-expanding project, a 63-mile stretch of the Owens River ran dry and Owens Lake was reduced to a sun-baked mud flat.

Water authority General Manager Pat Mulroy said state and federal regulations and improved pumping techniques will prevent the same thing from happening in Spring Valley, the White Pine County watershed where the authority hopes one day to tap up to 91,000 acre-feet of water a year.

"White Pine County is in a much better position than the Owens Valley was and is," Mulroy said after her testimony Monday.

But California water attorney Greg James sees a lot of similarities between the two situations.

"It's an eerie parallel," said James, who has represented Inyo County, Calif., home of Owens Valley, on water issues for more than 20 years. "Los Angeles has set a precedence for this sort of project."

James joined a group of pipeline opponents at a press conference in front of the legislative building Monday. During the event, organizers passed out pins and bumper stickers that sought to link water development in Spring and Owens valleys.

One similarity is the scale.

The 91,000 acre-feet of groundwater the authority hopes to pump from Spring Valley each year equates to almost 30 billion gallons. When stretched through reuse, it is enough water to supply some 280,000 homes in Southern Nevada.

When groundwater pumping in the Las Vegas Valley peaked in 1968, before the community began to draw a significant amount of its water from Lake Mead, 86,150 acre-feet was the most that was ever pumped.

Critics of the authority's plan for Spring Valley are calling it the largest withdrawal of water from a single basin the United States has seen since Owens Valley.

Mulroy said that might well be true, but if her agency's project is done responsibly, "so what?"

The hearing now under way at the Nevada Legislative Building will decide the fate of 19 water authority applications for groundwater in Spring Valley.

The courtlike proceeding began Monday and continued Tuesday with testimony from several financial advisers called by the water authority to outline the severe economic impacts of a sudden halt in growth, should Las Vegas outstrip its water supply.

The hearing is slated to last at least through next week.

Opponents of the plan include some rural officials, ranchers, conservationists, Utah officials and the Mormon church.

Utah officials protested out of concern for plans to pump groundwater in valleys that cross the Nevada-Utah boundary. The Mormon church says groundwater should not be pumped from Spring Valley until it's determined that will not harm the church and other water-rights holders.

State Engineer Tracy Taylor, who heads up the division, is expected to rule sometime next year on how much water, if any, can be exported from Spring Valley.

Owens Valley is a powerful cautionary tale, but water authority officials say there are plenty of examples of successful groundwater transfers from one basin to another, including several projects in Nevada that date back more that a century.

"If you drink water out of the drinking fountains in this building, you are drinking water from an inter-basin transfer. Eighty percent of Carson City's water comes from somewhere else," said Carson City attorney Paul Taggart, who is representing the authority at the water hearing. "In the West, we have always taken water from one place and used it in another."

James acknowledged that the chances of another Owens Valley are blunted somewhat by Nevada water law and the state and federal environmental regulations enacted during the latter half of the 20th century.

"The question is how thoroughly are (state and federal regulators) going to look at potential impacts," he said.

Inyo County continues to fight with Los Angeles over the impacts from water diversions. James said L.A. water managers often try to downplay the severity of what is happening or blame it on something other than their water project.

"It's very expensive to fight these battles out," he said. "If that's what happens through this process (in Nevada), we've made the same mistake."

James also warned of the importance of establishing safeguards and controls on the scope of the authority's pipeline before it is built.

Once the aqueduct to Los Angeles had been filled with water from Eastern California, residents there found it far more difficult to fight the project and keep it from expanding, he said.

Opponents of the pipeline from Eastern Nevada fear a similar result, once the Las Vegas Valley comes to depend on rural groundwater.

The amount of money spent on the project and "and the thirst for this water" will overwhelm any calls to shut the pipeline down, said Simeon Herskovits, southwest director of the Western Environmental Law Center, which is representing pipeline opponents at the hearing.

But water authority spokesman J.C. Davis said pumping groundwater is "not an all-or-nothing proposition," and the idea of one on/off switch for the entire pipeline network simply doesn't make sense.

If negative impacts do occur from groundwater pumping, they are likely to show up right at the well site, Davis said. To counteract that, the authority plans to rotate pumping through a series of wells spread out across Spring Valley.

Taggart said it wouldn't make any sense for the authority to invest so much money and time to build a pipeline to a place with no available unallocated water.

"Quite frankly, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is not in the business of creating an unreliable water supply for its customers," he said.

In the end, Mulroy said, invoking Owens Valley is an easy way for pipeline opponents to advance their "not one drop" agenda, but that won't solve anything. Already, she sees "the lines being drawn very sharply in the sand," she said.

"We see a vision of either a healthy Southern Nevada or a healthy rural lifestyle, a healthy economy in Southern Nevada or a healthy environment in Spring Valley. There is no need to have one and not the other," Mulroy said.

If solutions are to be found to water supply problems in Southern Nevada and across the West, she said, "it can't be done in an environment where you have winners and losers."

Responding to questions during state hearings into the plan to draw roughly half of the water from Spring Valley, near the Nevada-Utah border, the Southern Nevada Water Authority's resource director said SNWA wells would be shut off if overpumping occurred.

Ken Albright said that if the water authority's pumping conflicted with existing rights in the valley, options would include relocating wells, letting locals hook up to the SNWA system, "and most importantly we will cease pumping if that becomes a requirement."

Even if the various groundwater applications are granted soon, the SNWA has said the water is unlikely to reach the Las Vegas Valley before 2015.