The Nevada Assembly voted 30-12 in favor of a wide-ranging water conservation bill that could lead to caps on residential water use in Las Vegas.
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After dropping more than 50 feet since 2000, latest forecasts show Lake Mead rising by roughly 22 feet by the end of the year.
The two proposals show that “the tools available to the federal government are very blunt,” said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Since the 1980s, Southern Nevada has been banking its unused Colorado River water, storing hundreds of billions of gallons away underground and in Lake Mead.
The federal government laid out a pair of options to cut water use along the Colorado River and keep Lake Mead and Lake Powell from shrinking any more.
If approved, the legislation would make Nevada the first state to give a local water agency permanent say over how much water residents can use.
Nevada gets less than a 2 percent cut from the Colorado River’s waters, but the state actually uses far more water than that each year.