Rancher wants to call livestock as witnesses at pipeline hearing

A new hearing will be held this fall in Carson City on a plan to tap groundwater across eastern Nevada, and rancher Hank Vogler has already signed up to testify.

Apparently, so has his livestock.

Vogler has requested four weeks of hearing time so he can call 8,213 different witnesses, almost all of them of the four-legged variety.

He said his plan is to let his cattle, sheep and horses have their say because they will be affected first if the Southern Nevada Water Authority sucks their valley dry.

"They're the proverbial canaries in the coal mine," Vogler said. "Oh, and by the way, we're lambing right now, so that number's growing."

The state Division of Water Resources will hold a conference in Reno today to establish the ground rules for the hearing, which is set to start Sept. 26 and last into November.

The hearing is a redo for the water authority.

Last year, the state Supreme Court overturned the authority's water rights in four rural valleys and ordered the state engineer to conduct a second round of hearings on the massive pipeline project.

Southern Nevada water officials originally filed for water rights across rural Nevada in 1989 and 1990 to supply growth in the Las Vegas Valley. Now the plan to tap rural groundwater is being couched as drought protection for a community that gets 90 percent of its water from a single source: the Colorado River.

Despite a lull in the valley's growth and a recent rise in the water level at Lake Mead, spokesman J.C. Davis said the authority is pressing ahead with the state hearing and federal environmental review processes just in case.

"It's a safety-net project, and really we just need to get it permitted. We want to get it ready to be a construction project if and when conditions warrant it."

MAKING THE 'SAME BASIC CASE'

The authority already has spent tens of millions of dollars on studies, preliminary designs and legal work for the project, which is expected to supply Las Vegas with enough water for as many as 400,000 homes.

The network of pipes, pumps and reservoirs would cost at least $2 billion, according to authority estimates several years old. Opponents insist the project will cost considerably more than that.

This fall's hearing involves 25 groundwater applications in Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys in Lincoln County and Spring Valley in White Pine County.

The authority filed for almost 126,000 acre-feet of water in the four valleys, but the state engineer granted less than 59,000 acre-feet in rulings handed down in 2007 and 2008.

One acre-foot of water is enough to supply two average Las Vegas Valley homes for one year.

Davis expects the upcoming hearing to mirror the previous ones. He said authority officials will be seeking the "full amount" of water and putting on the "same basic case" as last time.

The outcome shouldn't vary much either, Davis said. "Nothing has changed that would lead us to believe we'd get less water."

MORE PROTESTS POUR IN

There is one big difference between this hearing and the last one. Some 213 rural residents, organizations and government agencies have filed protests against some or all of the authority's groundwater applications.

That's an increase of more than 100 from the last round of hearings, and it comes thanks to an order from the Supreme Court directing the state engineer to reopen a protest period that had been closed since the original applications were filed in 1990.

Vogler was living in north Spring Valley back then, but he said he didn't own any land or water rights that would have given him standing at the time.

Judging from his request for four weeks of hearing time, the 62-year-old rancher and farmer plans to make the most of his new opportunity to protest the pipeline.

But he is mostly kidding about bringing his livestock.

Vogler said he made the request because he needs to draw attention to his cause any way he can.

"I wanted something that would jump off the page," he said. "I can't afford to hire a $500-an-hour fire-breathing dragon to fight against the SNWA's 25 fire-breathing dragons, so they will take me down with a thousand paper cuts."

Even among water officials, Vogler is known for his humor. His nickname for the state capital is "Cartoon City."

He calls water authority chief Pat Mulroy "Patty Pah," after the Paiute word for water.

Vogler said that when it comes to the pipeline project, he considers it his duty to be "a turd in the punch bowl."

In the end, though, he said there is nothing funny about what could happen if the pipeline gets built.

Vogler and other opponents insist the valleys of eastern Nevada can't sustain large-scale groundwater pumping.

The project will destroy vegetation, starve wildlife and diminish the livelihoods of people living along its path, all without producing enough water to really help the Las Vegas Valley or justify the expense, he said.

"It flabbergasts me that for unlimited growth, we're willing to sacrifice the 16 rural counties of Nevada," he said. "They've decided it's better to destroy half of Nevada or better to make golf courses and swimming pools available to tourists in Las Vegas."

If the only way for him to make that point is by introducing some actual bull crap to the floor of the Legislature this fall, Vogler might just do that.

"Everyone in the state of Nevada is going to pay for this folly," he said. "It's beyond laughing. This is scandalous."

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