Tribes say feds haven’t protected them from Las Vegas pipeline project

Tribal leaders from Nevada, Utah and California blasted the federal government Wednesday for failing to protect them and their cultural heritage from a plan to pipe groundwater to Las Vegas from across the eastern part of the state.

Representatives from the tribes said the government has a legal obligation to consult with them and a trust responsibility to protect their interests. But federal officials have done neither as they negotiated mitigation agreements with the Southern Nevada Water Authority and conducted an environmental review of the proposed pipeline project, tribal members said.

"They're making decisions on our behalf without consulting the tribes," said Ed Naranjo, chairman of the Utah-based Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation. "It doesn't take that much to ask."

The statement from the leaders of eight different tribes in three states came during a Wednesday afternoon news conference at the Springs Preserve, the Las Vegas Valley Water District's monument to desert living, on Valley View Boulevard near U.S. Highway 95.

The tribal leaders met there earlier in the day with representatives from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Naranjo said the meeting didn't qualify as consultation, because the two agencies waited until the very end of the process and then sent some midlevel bureaucrats to talk to them.

"We're here, but yet there are no decision-makers here from the federal government," he said.

After more than six years of work, the BLM is wrapping up an environmental review of the water authority's multibillion-dollar project.

The authority wants to tap billions of gallons of groundwater a year from rural Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties and send it to the Las Vegas Valley through a pipeline network stretching about 300 miles.

The final draft of BLM's review is now in the hands of top water authority officials and other involved parties who will make last-minute edits, authority spokesman J.C. Davis said. The document is expected to be released for public review in July, with a final decision to follow in September on whether to allow the pipeline to be built across federal land, Davis said.

No Indian reservations lie in the direct path of the pipeline, but the project does cut through what Naranjo called the "ancestral roaming areas" of several tribes. It also threatens a number of sites considered sacred by American Indians, including a grove of swamp cedars in White Pine County's Spring Valley where Naranjo said more than 300 Indian men, women and children were massacred by the U.S. Cavalry in the 1800s.

Davis said the water authority is committed to protect culturally sensitive sites and will not be allowed to harm the swamp cedars in Spring Valley.

Authority officials have said they are not committed to building the contro­versial pipeline project. They simply want to finish the permitting process and be ready to start construction should the need arise.

The agency considers the project a safety net for the Las Vegas Valley, which draws 90 percent of its drinking water supply from the Colorado River by way of Lake Mead.

Authority leaders say the pipeline is probably inevitable because the community will need rural groundwater once it outgrows its finite share of the Colorado.

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