Vote on water rate hike, pump station set for Wednesday

Las Vegas Valley water customers could soon be asked to swallow their third rate increase in as many years for what officials are calling a $650 million hedge against Armageddon on the Colorado River.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority Board is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to build a new pumping station at Lake Mead and raise rates to pay for it.

The project is being framed as an insurance policy for a community that gets 90 percent of its water from the Colorado River but could lose access to all of it if the surface of Lake Mead drops another 85 feet.

It’s possible the lake never will sink that low, but even a small chance of it is worth guarding against, said water authority general manager John Entsminger.

A comparatively small rate increase for the project would “turn a 10 to 15 percent chance of not being able to deliver the water supply into a zero percent chance,” he said.

Wednesday’s meeting begins at 9 a.m. on the seventh floor of the water authority’s downtown headquarters at 100 City Parkway.

If approved, the fixed rate increase would be phased in gradually over three years, with the average residential water customer paying $4 to $5 more per month by 2017. Commercial customers and others with larger service lines would pay substantially more in dollars, though they would see roughly the same increase by percentage.

The pump station and rate increase come at the recommendation of the Integrated Resource Planning Advisory Committee, a 22-member panel of community representatives hand-picked by the water authority in 2012 to review the agency’s revenue structure and future water resources.

Committee member John Restrepo said the choice came down to managing risk.

“To me, it’s an investment that makes sense in context of what it protects,” he said. “We’re talking about the economic security of this community.”

Since 2000, the surface of Lake Mead has dropped about 130 feet amid record drought on the over-appropriated Colorado River.

The lake has risen by 4 feet since dipping to a new record low in August, but current projections call for it to fall back into record territory in April.

The reservoir surface now sits at about 1,084 feet above sea level. The two existing pump stations no longer will be able to draw water if the lake sinks below 1,000 feet above sea level.

The authority is nearing completion of a third intake pipe designed to pull water from the deepest part of the lake, about 870 feet above sea level, but it can’t be used to its full potential without a pump station reaching that far, Entsminger said.

“We now have a pipe to pull from the very bottom of the lake, but we don’t have the pumping capacity to do so,” he said.

Entsminger said the new pump station will take about a year to design and four years to build, so the soonest it might go on line is 2019.

Even under worst-case projections, Lake Mead’s water level is expected to stay above 1,000 feet until 2020.

The proposal up for board consideration Wednesday marks the third rate increase in three years and the eighth in the past decade.

Even with the increase now on the table, authority officials insist local water rates will remain below average among Western cities.

But a growing percentage of those charges will be unavoidable, no matter how much customers cut their water use. Right now, fixed charges unrelated to actual use account for about 42 percent of an average monthly water bill. If approved, the proposed rate increase would push that to about 47 percent.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.