With no project to oversee, Clean Water Coalition shuts itself down

After about a year and a half on life support, the end came quickly for the Clean Water Coalition.

It took the four-member board less than 20 minutes Thursday to finally disband the regional wastewater agency, which has lingered at the edge of oblivion since September 2011.

But this was no funeral. Board members grinned and joked with each other as the final vote was taken.

“We’ve got a time of death of 20 after,” said a smiling Henderson City Councilwoman Debra March, glancing at the clock in the Clark County Commission chambers.

The Clark County Water Reclamation District and the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas formed the Clean Water Coalition in 2002 to address the valley’s growing sewage problem.

As the population exploded, so did the amount of treated wastewater being dumped into Lake Mead by way of the Las Vegas Wash. The coalition planned to build an $800 million pipeline to bypass the wash and release the valley’s wastewater at the bottom of Lake Mead.

Then the economy tanked, drying up both the need for the project and the connection charge revenue expected to fund most of the work. In December 2009, the coalition board voted to suspend work on the project. It since has been canceled altogether, but the agency was kept alive in name only as Clark County and North Las Vegas squabbled over the use of a county storm channel to release wastewater from the city’s new treatment plant.

Until that dispute was resolved, North Las Vegas City Councilman Robert Eliason blocked the breakup of the coalition, which requires a unanimous vote by its board. The city and county finally settled their differences in November, clearing the way for Thursday’s vote.

As a joke, Eliason stood up and pretended to walk out of the room as the item was being considered.

Clark County Commissioner Larry Brown noted the historic nature of what they were doing, dissolving not some minor committee but a public agency once responsible for tens of millions of dollars.

In the end, though, the coalition won’t be remembered for anything it built or planned to build, coalition lawyer Robert Marshall said.

In May 2011, the agency won a major victory in the Nevada Supreme Court when justices blocked a move by state lawmakers to sweep $62 million from the coalition’s coffers.

Roughly $60 million of that money has been returned to the coalition’s member agencies to be funneled back to the developers and others who originally shelled it out in the form of sewer connection charges.

“We created good constitutional law which protects local money from the state’s efforts to take it,” Marshall said. “It’s just a great legacy.”

From now on, said coalition general manager Chip Maxfield, state lawmakers will have to think twice before taking money that does not belong to them. “They have to start living with what they have and not violating the constitution,” Maxfield said.

The former Clark County commissioner once drew a salary of $161,000 a year as head of the coalition. Since September 2011, he has been administering what is left of the agency for few hours a month.

“It’s not even a part-time job. It’s an occasional job,” Maxfield said.

But it pays well — $154 an hour.

Maxfield couldn’t say how much he was paid to run what was left of the agency over the past 17 months, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of $9,000.

The agency had almost $1.5 million left in its coffers Thursday. Maxfield said roughly $100,000 will be needed to cover a final audit, legal fees and other close-out costs. The rest of the money will go back to Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas and Clark County.

For anyone out there who is not quite ready to say goodbye to the Clean Water Coalition, its demise won’t become official until the last of its member agencies signs off on the termination agreement.

That is expected to happen within the next few weeks.

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