Voters endorse pipeline

A Mason-Dixon poll commissioned by the Review-Journal and released today shows strong support among Clark County voters for the proposed pipeline to bring groundwater from East Central Nevada. Southern Nevada voters -- who would foot most of the cost -- favor the pipeline 52-29, with 19 percent undecided.

Support for the project is less lopsided -- though still positive among both Democrats and Republicans -- when voters are sampled statewide, with support dropping to 39 percent. (Thirty-five percent are opposed; 26 percent undecided.)

That's because the poll of 400 registered voters found Northern Nevadans oppose the project, 47-to-13, with 40 percent undecided.

This resurfacing of the long-standing rivalry between North and South is understandable: In Northern Nevada it's common to discuss the project with reference to the "water grab" that saw fast-growing Los Angeles start piping water from the sparsely populated Owens Valley nearly a century ago.

The current project comes with numerous assurances that any draw down of water tables in the rural valleys will be carefully monitored. But let's not be disingenuous. Water is a state resource. The state of Nevada has a right to allocate its water in the manner most beneficial to the economic well-being of the state as a whole. The larger question is whether economic growth in Southern Nevada should be halted -- making our current, short-term recession look like child's play -- just to guarantee that the cattle of the Spring and Snake Valleys can continue to wade up to their fetlocks in runoff every spring. Or -- if the environmentalists had their way -- to spare inconvenience to any obscure pupfish or jackrabbit.

Ironically, it is the extreme wing of the environmental movement -- the groups that will almost inevitably file lawsuits challenging technical details of the pipeline plan, aimed at obstructing and delaying any project which places the well-being of humankind above the convenience of minnows and bugs -- that create the greatest impetus to get this project ready to go.

Such lawsuits drag out the time required before even a single shovel of dirt can be moved. If the Lake Mead drought should continue, those months of delay could make the valley's situation increasingly desperate -- with banks and others balking at investment here in the absence of a guaranteed water supply.

Multi-billion-dollar public works projects are not to be entered into lightly. But delay will only to add to the likely cost.

Yes, in the long run, the law of the river needs to be changed. It's absurd that, under the current compact, water needed for prospering cities goes to irrigate wheat in California -- and the farmers aren't even allowed to sell those water rights to upriver users at a mutually agreed-upon price.

But it's not pleasant to think of how great an economic crisis we might have to sustain before the lumbering gears of the federal bureaucracy might consider -- merely consider -- such an overdue remedy.

Today, the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority will be asked to voice support for the In-state Groundwater Development Project. The end of 2010 is the current target date for the authority to have all necessary permits "signed, sealed, and on the shelf," leaving them ready to build the central Nevada pipeline "on demand" -- barring the inevitable loony lawsuits.

At the very least, as a matter of basic stewardship, Southern Nevadans should demand that this project be brought to that state of readiness.