A splash of cold water

Reversing a District Court decision, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the groundwater applications underpinning a multibillion-dollar plan to pipe groundwater to Las Vegas from east central Nevada may not be valid.

The ruling raised the possibility that the Southern Nevada Water Authority could have to start the permitting process all over again.

The authority responded by filing a flurry of new water applications, though authority spokesman J.C. Davis said there's a chance the project won't be delayed, since the authority board hasn't even voted to build it yet.

At issue are the dozens of applications filed by the Las Vegas Valley Water District with the state engineer in 1989 for unappropriated groundwater in rural Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties, as much as 300 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The water was originally sought to supply anticipated growth in Southern Nevada, but is now also seen as a safety net for a community that gets 90 percent of its water from the drought-stricken Colorado River.

At the time of the initial filing, Nevada law required the state's chief water regulator to act on applications within one year. But because of backlogs, the district's water requests were not heard for almost two decades.

The justices, however, stopped short of nullifying the applications altogether. Instead, they sent the matter back to the rural District Court, where a judge will decide whether the authority should be required to submit new applications.

Opponents of the project express fears that too much water will be drained from the rural counties, harming lifestyles there.

The concerns of local residents -- who point to the massive transfers out of the Owens Valley in Southern California to slake thirsty Los Angeles beginning in the 1920s -- are doubtless sincere. Some of their more extreme environmental allies take a more cynical stand, however, revealing through their full-court-press approach that they intend to oppose any project facilitating urban growth, by any means possible.

Southern Nevada water chief Pat Mulroy has long predicted that efforts to slow the project would be largely "procedural," and that's clearly what we're seeing here. No one has held that the water isn't available, or that it's not within the power of state government to authorize transfer of excess water to wherever it will do the most economic good for the state as a whole.

The water authority has done the right thing in promptly re-filing its applications, just in case. It's perfectly possible that Southern Nevada's stalled growth, thanks to the current recession, will delay the need for this project -- giving the water authority board a hiatus in which to watch the course of development. That's not entirely a bad thing.

The lower court will now decide whether new hearings are needed. If so, the authority should certainly press to convene them quickly. Truly new facts or objections seem unlikely to arise at this point.