Drought brings cooperation

Southern Nevada Water Authority officials traveled to the desert near the Mexico border Wednesday to celebrate two projects they helped pay for even though they are hundreds of miles outside their service area.

The projects, which grew from interstate collaborations that seemed inconceivable just over a decade ago, should help squeeze more water out of the drought-stricken Colorado River.

Wednesday's tour began along the All-American Canal in California, where a new reservoir will soon begin capturing river water that would otherwise flow into Mexico but not count against that country's river allocation.

The water authority picked up roughly 80 percent of the cost for the $172 million reservoir. In exchange, the authority will be allowed gradually to take an extra 400,000 acre-feet of water out of Lake Mead over the next 25 years as conditions on the river system permit.

One acre-feet of water is enough to supply two average Las Vegas homes for one year. The 300,000 acre-feet Nevada gets from the Colorado River each year is used to supply about 90 percent of the water used in the Las Vegas Valley.

Municipal water purveyors in Arizona and California also bought into the so-called Drop 2 Reservoir, which the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation hopes to begin operating in July.

Lorri Gray-Lee is director for the bureau's lower Colorado River region. She said that a decade ago she never could have talked the region's water managers into paying millions of dollars for such a reservoir.

"They would have laughed me out of the room," she said.

Water authority chief Pat Mulroy said the drought on the Colorado has changed that. It has forced the states that share the river, and the municipal and agricultural interests within those states, to work together in ways they never did before.

It also has led major water purveyors such as the authority to invest directly in far-flung projects such as Drop 2 and a water desalting plant that is now being brought out of mothballs in Yuma, Ariz.

"And our next investment, if you want my prediction, will be in Mexico," said Mulroy, who was in Yuma on Wednesday to mark the reopening of the desalting plant. "So we'll even be leaving the United States and investing in the nation of Mexico."

Specifically, she said Nevada could one day help fund the construction of ocean desalting plants along the Mexican coast in exchange for a share of that country's Colorado River water.

The water authority could also buy into some future program that would pay farmers in Mexico to fallow crops temporarily that would otherwise use water from the Colorado.

Seven states and Mexico share water from the Colorado River under compacts dating back nearly 90 years.

The Yuma Desalting Plant will begin a one-year pilot program next week to test its ability to clean salt from agricultural runoff and deliver the water to Mexico.

The pilot run is expected to produce about 29,000 acre-feet of desalted water and allow an equal amount of Colorado River water to be kept in Lake Mead.

The authority will pay more than $2 million, or about 10 percent of the cost for the pilot run, in exchange for about 10 percent of the river water the plant's operation is expected save.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@review
journal.com or 702-383-0350.