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.
Assembly Bill 313 would require the backfilling of open pit mines once mining companies are done extracting ore and other minerals from the site.
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.
In 2021, Nevada banned the use of sirens that once sounded as signals for nonwhite people to leave a town before sundown. But nearly two years later, one such controversial relic still blares out each night in Minden.
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.
A Carson City judge has ruled that the appointment of former Sen. James Settelmeyer to lead the state conservation agency does not violate the Nevada Constitution.