County, North Las Vegas in gutter battle

We've seen local governments pick plenty of dumb fights over the years. Fitness groups and recreational sports teams have been kicked off otherwise empty parks and ball fields for not obtaining permits. Citizens have been harassed and arrested for engaging in all kinds of constitutionally protected expression at public forums.

But the ongoing, worsening dispute between Clark County and the city of North Las Vegas might be the silliest turf war of them all. The county won't let North Las Vegas discharge wastewater from its new $300 million sewage treatment plant into a county-controlled flood channel. Channels are used by city of Las Vegas and Clark County sewage treatment plants to send wastewater into Las Vegas Wash, and on to Lake Mead.

North Las Vegas merely wants to use the channel for the very purpose it was constructed for at taxpayer expense: safely diverting large volumes of water. And yet the county has stonewalled North Las Vegas for months, refusing to authorize the release of wastewater from a plant in the works for years.

So North Las Vegas officials, already spending $30,000 a day to have Las Vegas treat its wastewater and about $50,000 per day on bond debt and interest for a plant that was supposed to be running last month, started releasing wastewater Thursday at a rate of about 2 million gallons per day. Eventually, the plant will discharge 25 million gallons per day, enough to fill the channel with 6 inches of clear, nearly potable water.

And, knowing the county's chest-thumping would land the governments in court eventually, the city filed a lawsuit Thursday night asking a federal judge to declare that North Las Vegas has the authority to use the channel. The city has already received a permit from the state's Division of Environmental Protection.

"A 10-year-old kid don't bully a grown man," Commissioner Tom Collins, who represents much of North Las Vegas, said Thursday. "It's not even a David and Goliath thing, because they don't have a stone. Or even a slingshot."

Oh, please. What's in the water that Mr. Collins and his colleagues are drinking? They don't own the flood channels, the taxpaying public does. And North Las Vegas taxpayers are county taxpayers, too. It's as though county commissioners expect members of the North Las Vegas City Council to bring them tribute and kiss their rings. Or, in Mr. Collins' case, his cowboy hat.

Get over it and act like grown-ups. North Las Vegas decided long ago that it was in its residents' interests to take control of its sewage rates and stop depending on Las Vegas for wastewater treatment. It built its plant in an appropriate place, on leased U.S. Air Force land next to Sloan Channel. County leaders have no business trying to turn the plant into another empty valley building out of some misguided sense of superiority. They're not just playing games with North Las Vegas officials -- they're railroading North Las Vegas taxpayers.

Let the water flow.