A relentless drought combined with explosive growth in Southern Nevada is exhausting the options for satisfying the needs of 2 million residents

Transcription

1 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun LAS VEGAS SUN Quenching Las Vegas Thirst: Part 1: Satiating a booming city A relentless drought combined with explosive growth in Southern Nevada is exhausting the options for satisfying the needs of 2 million residents Sam Morris In 1979, Richard Bunker was tapped to head the Gaming Control Board. A devout Mormon, Bunker consulted trusted friend and religious icon James I. Gibson before accepting the job. Emily Green, Las Vegas Sun Sun, Jun 1, 2008 (2 a.m.) (Two decades ago a freshman Nevada congressman went calling on a cattle rancher in Northern Nevada. What would it take, Representative Harry Reid asked, for the rancher to sign off on plans to create a national park nearby. It was a bold question. Officials had tried and failed for 60 years to win the support of ranchers to create Great 1 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

2 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun Basin National Park. Now this new congressman was trying? Indeed, he was sitting at rancher Dean Baker s kitchen table in 1985, waiting for a reply. You ll have to protect our water, Baker said. The Great Basin aquifer, which sweeps underneath the great parched desert of Southern Nevada, burbles to the surface up north, outside Ely, where Baker and other ranchers have lived for generations. Without water, their livelihood would end. To Baker s delight, Reid agreed. The water would be protected. Reid and Baker met again 20 years later. The years had been kind to them. With water guaranteed, Baker was a wealthy man. Reid had moved up to the Senate and was on the verge of becoming majority leader, one of the most powerful posts in the nation. The occasion of their meeting in July 2005 was the dedication of a new visitor center for the park the two men had had a hand in creating. But things had changed. Las Vegas was in year six of a fierce drought. The booming town had nearly exhausted its allotment of water from Lake Mead. Soon, if nothing was done, Las Vegas, the economic engine that drives the state, wouldn t have enough water to support growth. So on this day, Reid asked Baker: What are your water rights? Translation: Las Vegas needs your water. Harry Reid and Dean Baker became adversaries. How had it come to this? A thriving region of nearly 2 million people was running out of water even as the mighty Colorado River flowed just 30 miles away. What trick of geology and climate forced Las Vegas, a city with no reason to exist except for its historical ingenuity and daring, to go to survival mode once more?) Richard Bunker will not be judged. As a Mormon bishop, he doesn t gamble, he doesn t smoke, he pays a full tithe to his church and he served a three-year mission in Finland. A direct descendant of some of the region s earliest pioneers and the son of a city councilman, Bunker too has dedicated his life to building Las Vegas. As Clark County manager, Bunker streamlined the infrastructure of what went on to become the fastest-growing metropolis in America. Bunker then reinvented modern gaming. In the process, he became a kingmaker in Nevada politics. He vows that his last act for Las Vegas will be to keep it in water. Las Vegas lies at the intersection of three deserts. To the west is the Mojave, to the south the Sonoran and to the north the Great Basin. 2 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

3 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun The Sonoran Desert marries California, Arizona and Mexico. The Mojave is largely a Californian desert that spills into Southern Nevada. Both are known as hot deserts, names that make more sense when it is 120 degrees in the summer than 10 below freezing on a winter night. Rains do come, but so rarely that the Sonoran s saguaro cactuses and the Mojave s Joshua trees have become international symbols of stoicism. North of Las Vegas, the Great Basin Desert begins. It too is largely dry, but this is a cold desert. Its altitudes are higher, its winters longer and colder, and its valleys are fed largely by snowmelt. The Great Basin Desert covers most of Nevada and relaxes eastward across the Utah border to claim the oldest stretches of Mormon country. As elevations steadily rise in the northward climb, the yuccas of the hot desert give way to a luminous green shrub called greasewood. The sheer brightness of its foliage screams a secret. Where there is greasewood, there is water. There was ground water once in Las Vegas, but growth unmatched since the gold rush has consumed it. Today Las Vegas relies on water from the Colorado River, stored in the country s largest reservoir only 30 miles outside the city. But in the world of water, proximity to water doesn t count. Historic claims do. The biggest belong to California, the smallest to Las Vegas. So to fuel its growth, Las Vegas has turned away from the Colorado. It now wants the water underlying the cold desert to the north. To get it, a water authority in no small part built by the Bunker family is in its 19th year of slowly but surely moving to pipe that water south. To Bunker, it is a historic duty to right a historic wrong. To critics, it is the biggest urban water grab since William Mulholland plumbed Owens Valley to serve Los Angeles. The thickset 74-year-old who enters a top-floor boardroom of the Southern Nevada Water Authority looks just like the figure captured over the years in newspaper photos. There is the rich crop of hair, now silver, the sun-spotted skin and the watchful and watery (and it turns out gray) eyes. Bunker may have retired, but the handshake hasn t. It is confident, firm but not crushing. Bunker has been around prying gentiles long enough to appreciate that his family story requires a disclaimer, which he delivers with high propriety: My great-grandfather was a polygamist before the church came out with an order called The Manifest, which forbids plural marriages. Richly framed photographs of that great-grandfather, Edward Bunker, and his first wife, Emily Abbott, hang in the original Mormon statehouse in Fillmore, Utah. According to a brisk and vivid account by the church historian Leonard Arrington, Edward converted to Mormonism in 1845, at the height of fervor about Joseph Smith s martyrdom. Scarcely a year after his conversion and only months after his first marriage, Edward began the grueling march to California as part of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican-American War. 3 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

4 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun Edward barely made it home before the church sent him off to proselytize in Great Britain. He returned with a pack of Welsh converts, not one of whom he could understand. They spoke only Gaelic. By the time Edward Bunker homesteaded his last colony for the church in 1877, he had been halfway around the world, had three wives and ended up in one of the most sun-blistered, hardscrabble bishoprics on the Mormon trail. At the suggestion of Brigham Young, his new colony on the Virgin River in the newly minted state of Nevada would be called Bunkerville. From the comfort of an air-conditioned office and removed by more than a century, great-grandson Richard Bunker shakes his head at the thought of it. Brigham Young could have sent him anywhere, he says. He chose to send them to Bunkerville. There are lots of nice valleys in Utah and Nevada. But he sent us to hell in the desert. He s not complaining, he adds. It s an interesting thing to contemplate. Moving water out of a river and spreading it across desert is as old as civilization. The ancient Persians did it. The Egyptians did it. The Romans did it, and as the West was settled, the Mormons did it. They had no choice. Vigilantes had chased them out of Illinois over their founder s promiscuity. Marc Reisner was only half-joking in his classic book Cadillac Desert that irrigation farming in the West is so fundamentally Mormon that when the U.S. government formed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902 to put arid land under the plow, Reclamation was by extension Mormon, too. But the Virgin River s unforgiving salt, mud and moods defied even the most resolute Mormons. During the rain, it would flood your crops, Bunker says. During the drought, your crops would burn up. The poverty was so pervasive that Edward instituted the Mormon equivalent of communism, called the united order, in which settlers pooled their wealth. The Bunkervillians dug irrigation ditches. They planted sorghum, alfalfa and vegetables. But the soil wasn t good earth, Bunker says. It was alkali dirt. The distinguished Mormon historian Juanita Brooks grew up in Bunkerville and her accounts lend sharp detail. The summer heat was so fierce, she recalled, that it thickened the whites of eggs left in the coop and made lizards flip over on their backs and blow their toes. The church gave up on polygamy before Edward Bunker gave up on Bunkerville. Only after the 1890 manifesto ending plural marriage did he take his first wife, and Richard thinks also the second, to Mexico. But Richard s great-grandmother, wife No. 3, moved west instead to St. Thomas, another Mormon farming community on another tributary to the Colorado River. To understand why Richard Bunker or any deeply rooted Southern Nevadan despises Californians and they do, oh they do just follow the water. As the unfettered Colorado River once tumbled out of the Rockies, it swelled to a massive force with infusions from tributaries in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. Steadily dropping elevations pushed it south through the canyons of Utah into Arizona, where it hung a sharp right West into the Mojave. There it etched the violent squiggle that breaks Nevada s ruler-straight borders and pushes south again, through the Sonoran Desert, along the fretful front line between Arizona and California until it flooded into the Gulf of Mexico. 4 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

5 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun The state with the most natural claim on the billions of gallons of rushing snowmelt is Colorado, but in Western water law, origin is moot. Catching it and utilizing it is everything. The 19th-century settlers who did this most successfully happened to sit farthest from the water s origin, in the Sonoran Desert of California, in a natural sink located just before the river flows into Mexico. A succession of 49ers prospecting their way across what was then known as the Valley of the Dead looked at the rich soil from silt deposited by past floods and reckoned they needed only to build levees to have unimaginable wealth. They renamed it the Imperial Valley, dug miles of channels and persuaded thousands to settle there on the gamble that earthen dams could contain the river that carved canyons from stone. The Colorado first swept away their head gates, then steadily eroded their levees as it poured into the California desert in such volume that it formed the Salton Sea. When the Imperial Valley emerged from the mud and chaos in 1907, the Californian mud farmers hadn t harnessed the Colorado River, but a series of irrigation districts throughout the region had done the next best thing. They had established a legal claim to the water. Under the law of prior appropriation, the first to claim the water had first rights to it. Californians might have claimed the whole river had they been able to build a dam capable of containing it. But that would take cash as well as concrete that only federal money can buy. Before the federal government could be persuaded to step in and dam the lifeline of the West, California would have to agree to share the water. That was a tall order. But in 1922, then-commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover resorted to jamming delegates from the seven states on the river into a remote New Mexican hunting lodge. He made sure that it was uncomfortable. They could come out when they agreed on a plan. It did not go smoothly. Four states, dubbed the Upper Basin states Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico particularly held that the river, at least the part that passed through their territories, was rightfully theirs. Downstream, California and Arizona were close to war over tributary water. Under the Colorado Compact and the act that six years later ratified it, the river basin was divided in half (with some treacherous exceptions). Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, the Upper Basin, were allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water. California, Arizona and Nevada were deemed Lower Basin states. They, too, came out of the enforced love-in with 7.5 million acre-feet of water, of which California received 4.4 million a year, Arizona 2.8 million and Nevada 300,000. At the time, the puny share did not bother the Nevadan delegation. The ground water springs of Las Vegas had such force that they formed geysers. Two percent of a big river on top of that, or in modern terms, enough water to supply 600,000 single-family homes for a year, was a lot of water for a 1922 railroad town. Umbrage came later. Only when Las Vegas began to outgrow its water did the Colorado Compact and its 1928 allocations come to be seen as a blunder, one that hits a regional nerve. Richard Bunker will tell you that it s Northern Nevada s fault. There were no Southern Nevadans at the table. Moreover, according to Bunker, the Northern ones just might have been drunk. There is no doubt that they imbibed, Bunker says. They followed almost to the letter the lead of the California delegation. For them to say 300,000 acre-feet was a lot of water for a place that was sand dunes, mosquitoes and rattlesnakes sounds fair, Bunker says. But when you look at what Arizona got, 2.8 million... he drifts off, 5 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

6 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun then sighs. It is what it is. The notion loosely held by Northern Nevada negotiators was that the Mormon farmers around Las Vegas might create a miniaturized version of the Imperial Valley. That didn t happen. As the Bureau of Reclamation began construction of Hoover Dam in 1931, Las Vegas became a staging area filled with construction workers whose needs could be largely summed up in a telephone book under B: boarding houses, brothels and bars. Moreover, that same year, Nevada legalized already prevalent gambling. Las Vegas added a C to its key services: casinos. In short, the mob didn t invent modern Las Vegas. The Bureau of Reclamation did. By the time Bunker was born in 1933, his family had moved to Las Vegas. Their family farm at St. Thomas was sacrificed to the rising waters of the new Lake Mead. Las Vegas still ran on ground water, with springs all over the valley. I used to swim in them, he says. His father and uncles became pillars of the community, serving on the city council and in the state Legislature and the U.S. Senate. But according to a touching eulogy for one of Bunker s uncles given by Nevada Senator Harry Reid, they still managed to be just folk, small-towners who ran a gas station and mortuary and who pulled together to create the Las Vegas convention center and its Mormon temple. Bunker himself made several stabs at elected office for a seat on the county commission early on and another in the state Legislature later in life but never won. He was perhaps too private, too proud and without a doubt something rarer: an audacious bureaucrat who became an unmatched political fixer. After graduating from Brigham Young University with a political science degree in 1959, he went into sales for a rock and sand business. A decade later he d become an analyst for Clark County. Next stop: head of the county s automotive division, then jobs as assistant city manager of Las Vegas, county lobbyist and, in 1977, Clark County manager. As lobbyist and then county manager, Bunker didn t so much manage the place as reinvent it. I had to replace the head of the building department, replace the fire chief and replace the head of the planning department, he says. Then in 1979, one of Las Vegas leading Mormon sons was tapped by the governor to head the Gaming Control Board. Mormon proscriptions against gambling go back to Joseph Smith. But from the time a Salt Lake City financier taught the mob about bank accounts in the 1950s, an understanding for Nevadan Latter-day Saints was emerging: Just don t touch the dice. Bunker recalls wrestling over it this way: I went to a friend, James I. Gibson, a religious icon here in the Southern Nevada area, and a state senator. I asked him, Jim, what do you think I ought to do? My supposition is that he checked with his contacts in Salt Lake and they said, By all means. We were better off being in a regulatory position over the industry than not being. The Gaming Control Board investigates applicants for gaming licenses. The Nevada Gaming Commission then issues the licenses. Heading the commission was another Latter-day Saint politician, a young Harry Reid. 6 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

7 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun Nevada was under pressure from the FBI and Congress to clear the mob out of Vegas before the federal government came in and did it for the state. It needed a blameless team. Who better to grasp the nettle than two Mormons? Except by June, Reid himself was beleaguered, presumed to be the Mr. Clean and Mr. Cleanface alluded to in FBI mob tapes unsealed in Kansas City. One of Bunker s earliest jobs would be, at Reid s insistence, to investigate Reid, who, Bunker concluded by February 1980, had been the victim of unmitigated character assassination. For the next year and a half, Reid and Bunker held hearings. Licenses were suspended. Names were put in the black book. A bomb was discovered in a Reid family car. Bunker sent his children to school with a police escort. Both men somehow survived the ridicule of 1981, when they announced they could find no evidence that Frank Sinatra was associated with the Mafia. While Reid endured the derision quietly, Bunker snapped. The Bunkerville Bunker turned on the visiting press corps, delivering what The New York Times correspondent described as his soliloquy. This state over the last 46 years has been very good to me, and it s because of the gaming, Bunker said. I personally don t believe in gaming, but it has provided the livelihoods for thousands of people who raised their children in this state. We have an economy here that is based on something that is illegal to every other jurisdiction but New Jersey, and people coming into this area, whether they be FBI, whether they be whoever they are, might come in here with different ideas than what some of us think that have lived here all our lives. As Bunker tells it, Howard Hughes, Steve Wynn and Kirk Kerkorian, the modern models of casino owners, entered stage left as the mob exited stage right. The industry duly cleansed, Bunker went on to become treasurer of Circus Circus and president of both the Dunes and Aladdin hotels. By 1990, Steve Wynn had opened the first megaresort, his competitors had half a dozen other huge ones on the boards, and Bunker was the head of the Nevada Resort Association and the most powerful gaming lobbyist in the country. One need only review Nevada s generous tax law pertaining to gaming to appreciate his prowess. But as New Vegas and its suburban skirt grew inexorably up and out, the problem was no longer the competition from Atlantic City, or whether Sinatra had hand-carried $2 million to Lucky Luciano, or mobsters skimming casino receipts, or who killed Kennedy. It was water. There was so much native ground water in early Las Vegas that not only did boys swim in springs, but according to Florence Lee Jones classic Water: The History of Las Vegas, homeowners routinely left town with their sprinklers running. Who knew that the local springs would be pumped dry? As it turned out, a succession of state engineers knew. By the 1950s, the valley had been pumped so hard that the ground was caving in beneath Nellis Air Force Base. Just as the golf courses began cropping up around casinos, the Strip had been pumped to capacity. Capping the wells and getting water users to hook up to a newly formed water system eventually killed the man who issued the battle cry. Months after the water stopped briefly in Las Vegas and state engineer Edmund Muth was driven 7 of 10 7/7/08 10:50 AM

8 Satiating a booming city - Las Vegas Sun from his job, he died of a heart attack. It was 1962, the same year the springs stopped flowing to the surface. But right up to the point that he died, Muth insisted Las Vegas had ample water. It needed only to switch from ground water to Colorado River water. As Las Vegas began the switch, Nevadans began wondering whether to revisit the Colorado River allocations fixed when the compact was ratified. In 1952, it just so happened that Arizona was about to haul California clear off to the Supreme Court over its river woes. Nevada hitched itself to the proceedings. The logic: If the highest court in the land was revisiting terms for Arizona, why not ask for more water for Nevada? Twice as much? Three times! As this giddy notion took hold a third of the way through a decadelong case, a reporter covering the trial concluded: Thus far in the suit only one thing has been definitely established. There is not enough water in the Colorado River to satisfy the demands of the states and Federal Government. After the special master assigned by the Supreme Court to hear the arguments also had a heart attack (he lived), he recommended that the court deny Nevada. In other words, between 1956 and 1962, the Supreme Court special master nearly died in the course of telling Nevada there wasn t enough water in the Colorado River, and Nevada s state engineer died arguing that all would be well if Las Vegas just moved its water source from ground water to the Colorado River. As the population of Clark County hit 2 million late last year, Southern Nevada was stretching the last drops from its Colorado River allocation. But Las Vegas had a backup plan: pumping the ground water of the Great Basin Desert. This time the obstacle wouldn t be California but Utah. The Great Basin covers most of Nevada and half of Utah. To tap its aquifer, Southern Nevada must turn on the very heartland of the old Mormon state. It fell to Bunker to represent Nevada s need to Utah. In July, the governor of Nevada announced that Bunker had become the state s special negotiator for the water under dispute with Utah. Standing with him in a larger political press for it is his old confrere, Harry Reid. Again, Nevada is trotting out its Mormons. Again, Richard Bunker will not be judged. Contine to Part II: The Chosen One

9 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun LAS VEGAS SUN Quenching Las Vegas Thirst: Part 2: The Chosen One Anointed to head the valley s water district, Pat Mulroy has already reaped big rewards while earning her comparisons to the man who turned California s Owens Valley into a dust bowl. Sam Morris Once dubbed Scarlett for her dramatic and determined efforts to keep Southern Nevada in water, Pat Mulroy stands in a replica of a water pipe at Las Vegas Springs Preserve. By Emily Green, Las Vegas Sun Sun, Jun 8, 2008 (2 a.m.) The men who manage urban water districts in the West tend to come out of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Who better to understand how and where Western water is taken from the Colorado River? They are not fazed that people consider them nuts for having proposed such a system of dams, reservoirs and 1 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

10 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun open-air canals to deliver water across blazing deserts. To explain why their system was built that way, Reclamation veterans will point to the tangled evolution of the Colorado Compact, their Magna Carta, their constitution. After that, they will invite you to penetrate the bulging casebook of resolved water feuds known as the law of the river. It s not a perfect system, they will say, but it works. It s not a perfect system, but it s better than no system. These men even have a nickname: The water buffaloes. But when Pat Mulroy took over as general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District in 1989, she was not a man, not from Reclamation, not even particularly experienced in water. Nobody accused her of being a buffalo. Her reaction to the Colorado Compact and its water delivery system, which sends the least water to the city closest to the river s largest reservoir, earned her a different nickname entirely. Scarlett. For those unfamiliar with Gone With the Wind, Scarlett is the ruthless, scheming, tough, histrionic and beautiful one who thrusts the turnips in the air and cries, As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again! Mulroy s vow: Las Vegas would never be thirsty again. When Clark County Manager Richard Bunker first interviewed Pat Mulroy for a general administrative job in 1978, she was 25, exotic, blond and smart. A German-born daughter of an American father and a German mother, she was working at UNLV trying to finance a master s degree in German literature at Stanford University. She hoped to eventually parlay this into a job with the State Department, but she also recalls that she was in desperate need of a job. Diplomacy s loss was Bunker s gain. As she sharpened her pencils and found her parking spot at the Clark County manager s office in 1978, she realized this was no ordinary administrative job. Bunker was furiously fighting off annexation of the Strip by the city of Las Vegas. The city itself was still so overtly a mob town that, as Mulroy recalls it, you d look up and Tony Spilotro would be standing over your desk. It was wild. Mulroy was so capable that Bunker quickly promoted her to lobbyist for Clark County, working the halls of the Nevada Legislature in Carson City. She drafted and then politically finessed legislation creating the public administrator s office. (If you die intestate in Clark County, your heirs will find out what this office does.) This was most definitely not wild, but it taught her how to turn ideas into laws. Not two full years after starting work with Bunker, it was over. Returning from a German holiday in January 1979, she learned from the passenger next to her that her mentor had just been appointed to the Gaming Control Board. I landed and went, Gee, I wonder if I still have a job? She did, a number of them, but Bunker hadn t spotted the job that would define her yet. By 1985, after a series of turnstile administrative positions, she landed as deputy general manager in charge of administration at the Las Vegas Valley Water District. Four years later, the district was looking for a new general manager. 2 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

11 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun As weighty as the deputy title sounds, it was in no way an obvious steppingstone to the general manager s job. Administrators administrate. Water managers fight to keep their regions in water. But Bunker saw steel and rare competence in Pat Mulroy, according to Mulroy, qualities that she didn t even see in herself. He pushed her to apply for the top job. Now, the logical candidate in terms of experience was not only a water buffalo but head buffalo, former Reclamation Commissioner Bob Broadbent. Bunker, however, had a water pedigree to top that. He came from three generations of Southern Nevada Mormon irrigation farmers and renowned city burghers. One uncle had been among the U.S. senators to get Henderson hooked up to Lake Mead, another as a state assemblyman had tackled the crisis when casino wells threatened to cave in the ground beneath their golf courses. His father had led the formation of the Las Vegas Valley Water District. By this point, Bunker himself was such an effective gaming lobbyist he all but spoke for the Strip. He understood, from the water mains upward, what was unfolding in a town that was about to give rise to the megaresort. The man who as county manager had chosen fire chiefs and city planners did not want a buffalo running the Las Vegas Valley Water District. A buffalo would passively allow Las Vegas potential to be capped by its allocation from the Colorado River. A buffalo would be a true believer in the Colorado Compact, the treaty behind the building of Hoover Dam and Lake Mead and what Bunker regarded as the 1922 selling out of Las Vegas by Northern Nevada. No, Bunker wanted Mulroy, so he did what came most naturally to him. He lobbied her. At first she resisted. Richard talked me into it, Mulroy recalls. He talked at me like a Dutch uncle. It took a while. The vote was 6-1 to appoint her general manager of the district. Clark County Commissioner Jay Bingham cast the dissenting vote. He said he didn t think she was tough enough. He may be the last person ever to hold that view. As Mulroy took over the job, at first on an interim basis, even Bunker was not prepared for her daring. She abhorred waste. The Las Vegas she inherited epitomized it. Rep. Shelley Berkley was working at the Sands when she first noticed the Water District s new general manager. Berkley still shakes her head on recalling walking into a hotel conference room and seeing Mulroy berating some of the biggest names in town on water conservation. If they didn t come to the table, Mulroy went to them. Probably the first confrontation was with Steve, Mulroy says. Steve Wynn. He was just about to build Treasure Island. We were in the midst of banning lakes and water features, so he calls me down to the Mirage and grilled me for two hours. I was very blunt with him. He said, OK, what do I need to do? I said, you need to use gray water treated wastewater. When she left his office, she carried a check for $100,000 for her conservation program and a dare to get every other casino owner to match it. 3 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

12 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun The biggest of the big shots in town became her most vocal advocates, Berkley says. Ironically, the most egregious waste wasn t from the casinos but from the seven local water companies serving the Las Vegas Basin: Boulder City, Henderson, North Las Vegas and so on. You got what you used, Bunker recalls, so everyone was using everything they could. If they couldn t use it, they dumped it into storm drains to protect their allocations. Mulroy headed only one of the seven. She needed the other six to get with the program. Almost immediately, Mulroy was pressing them to pool their collective water under a new agency. Bunker didn t like her chances. There was too much jealousy. But Mulroy had bait. Since the mid-1980s, the Las Vegas Valley Water District had been hunting Northern and Central Nevada for new water. The notion of slipping ground water away from the rural counties promised an uproar. So quietly, very quietly, Vegas prospectors scoured the water audit bulletins of the state engineer, sizing up just how much ground water might be funneled out from beneath the rest of the Nevada to serve the Las Vegas Valley. In October 1989, seven months into Mulroy s tenure as general manager, the Las Vegas Valley Water District filed applications in Carson City for unclaimed ground water in 30 basins across four counties, a prospective haul of roughly 840,000 acre-feet of water reportedly half the unclaimed water in Nevada. State Sen. Virgil Getto, representative of the most water-rich counties targeted by Las Vegas, was on the Legislature s Natural Resources Committee at the time and says he had no inkling of the plan until announcements of the filings began appearing in regional newspapers. I thought it was a dirty trick, he says. Mulroy would have a long road to travel to persuade the state engineer of Nevada to award Las Vegas the rights to pump even a fraction of it, but the applications meant that she had dibs on almost three times Las Vegas allotment from the Colorado River. The rival water companies signed on to her plan. She had her new agency. After only three years in office, she was general manager not only of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, but also of a new regional supercooperative that comprised all seven water companies serving the then-835,000 residents of Clark County. Once she had formed the Southern Nevada Water Authority in 1991, Mulroy wanted it to have a seat at the negotiating table with the six other states vying for water from the Colorado River. That job then lay with Nevada s Colorado River Commission, a gubernatorial body that acted as water wholesaler to Las Vegas. Mulroy wanted her own appointees on it, people who understood the nitty-gritty of the water business, not grace and favor appointees by the governor. She was sitting with Bunker in a Carson City restaurant when she mapped out a scheme to stud the governor s commission with members of her staff. In a bit of lobbying so successful that it surprised even Bunker, he got the idea past both the governor and the Legislature. As pure icing, by 1993 Bunker was on the river commission and by 1997, he was chairman of it. The upshot: Northern Nevadans in Carson City might have settled for the smallest allocation from the Colorado River without any Southern Nevadans at the table in the 1920s. 4 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

13 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun That wouldn t happen again. Every triumph has a price tag. Assuming control over the local water districts of greater Las Vegas meant taking on their collective commitments to provide water to builders. We were issuing Will Serve letters left and right because we believed the myth we had all the water we d ever need, Mulroy says. And then one day, we were sitting with our attorneys and saying, We could have a problem. Valentine s Day 1991 was the day she refused to issue any more automatic Will Serve letters to developers. Her message: Just because you own a piece of dirt doesn t mean you have any water to go with it. From then on, they would have to commit to a project without a guarantee of water. Logical policymakers might have controlled growth: 1991 was the year that poll after poll began showing residents in favor of slower, planned development. History might read differently if Clark County residents voted as they polled and if a quarter or more of them weren t transient. But for those who stayed, as Steve Wynn went from his tropical lagoon to grand luxe phase, Las Vegas meant union catering jobs, cheap housing and low taxes. Politicians who tilt at their constituents prosperity, or even more perilously at that of Las Vegas developers, should ask state Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus what happened after she proposed putting a ring around growth in Las Vegas. (She was ridiculed for mistaking Las Vegas for that communist enclave, Portland, Ore., then defeated for the governorship by Jim Gibbons.) But Mulroy the lobbyist survived taking water guarantees away from builders by persuading them that their fortunes would come by taking risks. This was her New Paradigm, and it went like this: With Mulroy at the water company and Bunker and a number of her staff on the river commission, Las Vegas would just keep building above and beyond the capacity of its river allocation. It was a Las Vegas-sized dare. The logic: Defy the limits under Nevada s Colorado River allocation. Dare the six other states on the Colorado River, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and its overseer the Interior secretary to not give them more water. As the New Paradigm was unveiled in the press, a spokesman for Nevada s Colorado River Commission even announced, I say the federal government will never let Nevada go dry. The buffaloes put down their newspapers at the sheer nerve of it. There was only one place from which Nevada could get more Colorado River water. From California. If they failed, they still had the ground water applications in rural Nevada. Water is fuel. Without it, runaway growth across the Southwest would not be possible. To witness what cheap, federally subsidized water out of the Colorado River can do, look at the urbanization of Southern California, served by the Metropolitan Water District. Where once they grew oranges, lemons and limes, they now grow 5 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

14 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun houses and freeways. None of it was possible on the roughly 500,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water left over for Southern California cities after farmers took their 3.85 million-acre-foot share. It was possible only because California was enjoying water unclaimed by the four Northern Basin states New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. The Metropolitan Water District proved unmatched in the Lower Basin in glomming onto the surplus, as much as 800,000 acre-feet a year. Combined with water drawn from the Sierra and another vast siphon from Sacramento to Los Angeles, the endless suburbs of Southern California were sucking up so much water that the runoff into the Pacific from lawn sprinklers and car washing alone reached an estimated 1 million acre-feet a year. That was more than three times the Colorado River allocation for all of Southern Nevada, enough potable water for 2 million families, rushing through the gutters of greater Los Angeles and sweeping cigarette butts and motor oil out to sea. Nevada wanted what California was wasting, so, Bunker says, we had to do some surgery. In 1992, that meant lobbying new Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona. Before taking office, Babbitt had been so opposed to Las Vegas ground-water applications that he had offered legal advice to rural Nevadans protesting the pipeline. But like any Arizonan, Babbitt was also a natural ally of Las Vegas in any drive to curb California excess. By the time Babbitt left office in 2001, Nevada had been so successful in bringing California s draw on the river back into line that even President Bush s new interior secretary adopted the Babbitt policy. Mulroy did not stop there. Ferocious in search of water, she executed trades so complex that in 2006 even the state engineer s panel of professional water people had trouble following them. A sample: She struck a massive water-banking deal with Arizona, paying Arizona to store unused water in its aquifer and allowing Las Vegas to withdraw the difference from Lake Mead. She bought up historic, pre-colorado Compact water rights on the Virgin and Muddy rivers, both Colorado River tributaries. She moved with Arizona and California to have a reservoir built that will prevent Mexico from receiving more Colorado River water than it is allocated, and secured the right to draw some of the saved water from Lake Mead. But the biggest, most potentially valuable supply of water in the Las Vegas water plan was still the vast pool underlying the Great Basin. The Great Basin got its name because the region doesn t drain to the sea. Extending from Death Valley to Salt Lake, it amounts to a 200,000-square-mile bowl engulfed by mountainous walls the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range to the West and the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau to the East. It contains most of Nevada, a slice of Northern California, a small topping from Oregon and roughly half of Utah. The topography is classic Western basin and range and, for all its beauty, it s a prehistoric accident scene. 6 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

15 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun Nevada, from the Spanish for snow-capped, was named for its hundreds of ranges. These were formed by the stretching of the continent until it ripped apart, tossing rock and earth into what is now a heroic network of north-south-running mountains and valleys. As glaciers melted at the close of the Ice Age, the trapped store of ground water in the often porous jumble of rock underlying the area became the Great Basin carbonate aquifer. In stark contrast to the way a massive tide of snowmelt from the Rockies courses toward the sea in the Colorado River, spring thaw in the dry ranges of the Great Basin is glugged up by plants, animals and people. What life exists naturally aboveground, both in the hot desert to the south and in the cold desert to the north, depends on the state of the underground water table. In dry valleys, the upward pressure of the carbonate aquifer sustains the springs feeding startling oases, even in the blazing deserts of Lincoln County. In wet valleys, the aquifer s pressure can make the desert seem suddenly lush. Snowmelt from the ranges drains into such highly saturated basins that it dances out of springs, then streams onto the valley floors. It can even shoot from newly drilled wells. Just this kind of thing used to happen in Las Vegas before it pumped its local store of ground water so hard that a place whose name means the meadows became scrub. Nothing terrifies the cold desert counties north of Las Vegas more than the prospect of seeing their valleys similarly denuded. Over in the Sierra, the Los Angeles Aqueduct drained what was once Owens Lake so dry that by the 1970s, its parched alkaline playa was the source of routine dust storms behind the worst recorded particulate air pollution in U.S. history. Owens Valley had once been a lake. By contrast, the basins at the heart of the Las Vegas pumping plan had mainly seasonal springs and streams. In dry years, dust storms were common. The minute that Mulroy s applications for the Great Basin became public in October 1989, the protests were so thick that in no time Scarlett was being likened to another mythic figure, the man who inspired Chinatown. Between 1989 and 1994, every major newspaper in the country had likened Mulroy s project to that of the notorious William Mulholland, the Los Angeles water manager whose aqueduct had reduced the once lush Owens Valley to a dust bowl. Some of the worst pain registered in Las Vegas itself, where biologists feared the loss of an international treasure. The only other desert in the world with anything comparable to Nevada s storied flora existed in Persia, says College of Southern Nevada botanist David Charlet, until the cradle of civilization sucked it dry. Among the more than 3,600 protests to Mulroy s plan sent to the state engineer were ones from almost every agency in the Department of Interior except Reclamation. To get her water, Mulroy would have to go through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management. 7 of 10 7/7/08 10:51 AM

16 The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun To top it off, no group took more passionate exception to Mulroy s plan than the descendants of the very pioneers of the region. To rile a Utah Mormon, try describing the Great Basin aquifer as a Nevada in-state resource. By February 1994, a chastened Mulroy had backed off the plan, so far that in an interview with the High Country News, she cheerfully quoted and even appeared to concur with critics that the Las Vegas pipeline was the singularly most stupid idea anyone s ever had. Then the dawn of the century brought drought. Contine to Part III: The Equation: No Water, No Growth

17 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun LAS VEGAS SUN Quenching Las Vegas thirst: Part 3: The Equation: No water, no growth To spur development, Las Vegas politicians make a set of deals that secure land and fund a water pipeline. But before the water can flow, they must challenge Nevada s ancestry its ranchers and Utah. Sam Morris At Las Vegas Springs Preserve, Senator Harry Reid stands amid a re-creation of the land auction that created Las Vegas. For years, Reid pressed legislation that freed up acres for development in Southern Nevada and slowly but surely laid the groundwork for a ground water pipeline. By Emily Green, Las Vegas Sun Sun, Jun 15, 2008 (2 a.m.) The congressman from American Samoa was confused. Could Senator Reid clarify for him again who owned the land around Las Vegas? 1 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

18 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun Nevada? The U.S. government? Bugsy Siegel? My sense of curiosity is raised in the fact that Las Vegas was developed by I think it was an entrepreneur, he said. It was out in the desert... Well, Harry Reid replied, the entrepreneur was Brigham Young. Oh, I thought it was a Jewish fellow that started the first casino... The congressman pressed on, struggling to understand the Nevada lands bill that Reid was asking the House to adopt. I am trying to develop a sense of why we didn t just give half of what is owned by the federal government to the state of Nevada and let them take care of it? It seemed incomprehensible to the House Resources Committee in 1997 that Reid and the other members of the Nevada delegation felt they needed to justify the release of tens of thousands of acres of federal land around Las Vegas. Not one member of the House Resources Committee seemed to appreciate how the federal government had come to own much of Nevada in the first place. The answer was water, more specifically the lack of it. Nevada was so dry that ever since statehood, its government had laid claim only to areas around its rivers and springs, and left management of its vast, dry reaches to the Interior Department. But the bill that Senator Reid and then-congressman John Ensign presented to the House of Representatives had a formula to change that. Embedded in it was a shadow plan to get more water. Reid was right. Brigham Young was Las Vegas first entrepreneur. After leading his faithful into the Great Salt Lake Basin in 1847, the man whom George Bernard Shaw dubbed the American Moses saw most of the American West as the makings of a theocratic nation state, the Kingdom of Deseret. He promptly dispatched his followers to colonize it. Deseret will go down as a place of many ifs. Young might even have held onto the Utah Territory if he hadn t tried to defy U.S. law over polygamy. When the ultimate borders were drawn, Nevada emerged as a mining state whose backup business plan proved to be prostitution, gambling and quick divorce. Utah became the country s national symbol of temperance and industry with a pointedly Mormon emblem, a beehive, embedded in its state seal. Binding this new yin and yang was water, or lack of it. No railroad promotions, no federal farm act could change the fact that both Nevada and Utah sat in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada. On the new map, Nevada officially became the driest state in the nation, Utah the second driest. Water was so short that in 1880, fledgling Nevada persuaded Washington to downsize state-held land from of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

19 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun million acres to its choice of 2 million so it could concentrate development around existing settlements and lakes, rivers and springs. As far as Nevada was concerned, the federal government could control the other roughly 68 million acres. More than a century later, Nevada was every bit as dry except for the fast-diminishing 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water delivered to Las Vegas every year compliments of Uncle Sam. The beauty of this water was that, when asked its cost, a Southern Nevada Water Authority information officer shrugged and said, Basically free. And so as Reid put before Congress a bill that proposed orderly disposition of federal land for yet more growth in what was the fastest-growing city in America, land released for development would need more water. The bill envisioned a way to get that, too. Advising the Nevada delegation on the bill was Marcus Faust, the Utah-born wizard of K Street natural resources lobbyists, son of a prominent Utah Democrat and a man then regarded as one of the living prophets, seers and revelators of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Back in Nevada, the team was completed by Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and her mentor, Richard Bunker, gaming lobbyist, civic leader, Mormon bishop and head of the Colorado River Commission. Their plan: Persuade the federal government to sell land and use 10 percent of the proceeds for new pipes and such. To fill the new pipes, the group was lobbying hard elsewhere to get Southern Nevada more of that federally subsidized, basically free water from the Colorado River. If that failed, the group was also sitting on an incendiary scheme to pump the Great Basin s ground water. That water would not be free. It would require a multibillion-dollar pipeline running hundreds of miles north, through Clark, Nye, Lincoln and White Pine counties. Moreover, the danger of that plan was that it would drain the life out of Brigham Young s old empire. Few men understand old Deseret and new Nevada better than Harry Reid. The Senate majority leader was born in 1939 to an alcoholic hard rock miner, also named Harry Reid, in a Mojave mining camp roughly 60 miles south of Las Vegas. His mother worked as a laundress for the brothels serving Reclamation men working south of Hoover Dam. Reid was not yet a Mormon. There were no churches in Searchlight, Nev. Once Reid began hitchhiking to high school in Henderson, an aunt introduced him to Mormonism. He began attending seminary before school. After high school teacher and boxing coach Mike O Callaghan passed the hat to raise scholarship money, Reid set off for Southern Utah State College. After he transferred to Utah State University, Reid returned to Henderson to claim the hand of his high school sweetheart, Landra Gould, according to O Callaghan the prettiest girl in the class. 3 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

20 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun Few passages in Reid s new biography, The Good Fight, are as touching as those recounting their elopement. As she worked to put him through college and they started a family, the couple were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When Reid got into law school in Washington, D.C., O Callaghan twisted the arm of a Nevada congressman to help Reid get a job to support his family. And when Reid returned to Nevada to take the bar exam, his old high school coach now head of Nevada s Department of Human Services met him at the Reno airport and pressed a crisp $50 bill into his hand to help with food and lodging. In 1970, O Callaghan ran for governor and Reid, just 30, ran for lieutenant governor. Both men won, but as O Callaghan went on to become one of the most beloved governors in Nevada history, Reid was about to enter a wilderness. After watching Muhammad Ali train at Caesars Palace, it was close to noon on June 22, 1972, when Reid the avid amateur boxer, euphoric after meeting a hero, more or less floated back to his office. His mother was on the phone. Your pop shot himself, she said. A bid for the Senate failed, as did another for mayor of Las Vegas. Reid s political career might have ended in 1977 had the paternal arm of O Callaghan not reached out again, tapping him to head the Nevada Gaming Commission. O Callaghan later described it as the most important appointment of his governorship, saying, Harry led the commission through its most challenging time. Reid describes himself as having wandered into some terrible fun house. Modern profilers of Reid invariably stop at star-struck mentions that he was the model for Mr. Cleanface, Dick Smothers character in the film Casino, Martin Scorsese s comic opera about the last gasp of mob Vegas. Reid claims to not have seen the film, though he proudly takes credit for having signed in 1978 the exclusion order banning the real-life model for the movie s rapturous killer, Tony the Ant Spilotro, from entering a Nevada casino. Bomb threats became so commonplace, Reid says he lost count. But in 1979, the unsealing of FBI tapes in which a mobster claimed to have a Mr. Cleanface in his pocket put the Mormon gaming commissioner under suspicion. Reid wanted to quit. Listen and listen close, O Callaghan told him. You quit this job and you ll regret it the rest of your life. When another prominent Mormon, former Clark County Manager Richard Bunker, was appointed head of the Gaming Control Board that same year, one of his first jobs was to investigate and clear Reid. Then, in 1980, it fell to both Mormon crime-busters to rehabilitate Frank Sinatra, and Las Vegas with it. Back in 1963, Sinatra had lost his Nevada gaming license over alleged association with mobster Sam Giancana. In February 1981, he wanted the license back, this time to operate out of Caesars Palace. As the world s press 4 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

21 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun poured in to see Sinatra go before the commission, Las Vegas was scruffy. There had been a series of tragic hotel fires. Gas prices were discouraging the weekend motorcades from Los Angeles. Atlantic City was waylaying Easterners. The Strip needed Frank back. Harry Reid and Richard Bunker saw that it got him. The stint revived Reid s political fortunes and he was elected to the House of Representatives in By the time he d risen to the Senate in 1987, there was a new political reality to go with the at-least-notionally new, clean Vegas. As historian Michael Green puts it, whatever Reid s faith might dictate about gambling (Mormonism eschews it), representing gaming is as basic to being a senator from Nevada as it would be for a senator from California to champion Disney. Reid and Bunker had Nevada s back as the rest of the country woke up to the potential of gaming in the 1990s. By then Bunker was president of the Nevada Resort Association, the casino industry s lobbying arm. In Washington in 1992, when 46 states tried to get in on the proceeds of sports betting in Las Vegas, Reid blocked it. Two years later, as President Clinton considered a 4 percent tax on gross gambling receipts to fund a child welfare program, Reid stood on the White House lawn and proclaimed that if Clinton went forward with it, I will become the most negative, the most irresponsible, the most obnoxious person of anyone in the Senate. No state, not even Alaska, holds more federal land than Nevada, where more than 60 million of the state s roughly 70 million acres are federally owned or managed. As Reid gained leadership of the Nevada delegation and then the Senate itself, the Nevada delegation finally had the cohesion and Reid the clout to begin to wrest Nevada from the Interior Department. A placeholder of a state was about to become a real state. But nothing about the push would have been possible without Washington s natural resource lobbyist Marcus Faust. A large, slightly palsied and professionally discreet man, Faust ended his on-the-record interviews with the media shortly after Reid s bill passed in But as Faust s visibility decreased, his influence intensified. If you want water, or land, or to keep conservation development-friendly in the West, you become his client. He s a genius, says client George Caan of Nevada s Colorado River Commission. He drafts bills, teaches clients how to testify at hearings, shows up and bolsters them as they do it. He generally knows their political representatives better than the clients themselves, and although those politicians come and go in Washington, Faust remains a constant. Almost two decades earlier, when Reid was still holding gaming license hearings, Faust had drafted the blueprint for the Southern Nevada Public Management Land Act. It was the Santini-Burton Act of 1980 and it provided a prototype in which proceeds from sales of marginal federal land around Las Vegas were directed to rehabilitate the Lake Tahoe Basin. The bill s originator, Representative James Santini, recalls it was a win-win for Nevada. Marginal land in the 5 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

22 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun Las Vegas Valley used largely as spontaneous dumping grounds could be sold to create housing, and the cash generated could be used for fire control and habitat restoration in Lake Tahoe. Although cash from the sales went north and to both Nevada and California Tahoe restoration projects, according to Reno-born Santini, the value to Las Vegas was a boost in the tax base. By 1997, Santini was long gone from office (defeated by Reid). A new, proud and politically connected Las Vegas wanted more than land releases, it wanted more of the proceeds to go back into projects that benefited Southern Nevada. Again Faust was on hand to assist with the drafting. The new bill had survived its first, largely unpopular year in Congress under the stewardship of John Ensign. In 1997, Reid assumed political custody and began shaking the problems out of it. As it evolved under Reid, it mandated that recipients of funding include habitat restoration on the Colorado River, the Department of Aviation, public education and a host of other environmental and civic projects. To see the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act heralded as a source of parks, trails and shooting ranges for the people of Las Vegas and the prototype for lasting wilderness protection, go to Reid s Web site or talk to his most ardent ally, the Wilderness Society For the version in which it s the first of a series of federal giveaways to Reid cronies and Faust clients, go to the Western Lands Project, The Los Angeles Times or The New York Times. To hear how it checkerboards wilderness with development in a way that will strand and destroy wildlife, go to Defenders of Wildlife. No bill divides Nevada environmentalists quite so thoroughly. At first, Interior hated it, says the water authority s Mulroy. As it happened, Mulroy hated early drafts, too. Before she would support the bill, she had a condition. If Nevada delegates wanted to expand the city, they would have to expand the water authority, too. Look, she d say to the Nevada congressional delegation, developers don t buy land to watch cactus grow. Mulroy was also a Faust client. A clause was inserted into the bill. Ten percent of proceeds of the land sales would go to Mulroy s water authority. To see what difference a clause can make after 10 years and the sales of 47,000 acres of land, go to the Bureau of Land Management s bookkeepers. According to their tables, as of March 31, at $285 million and counting, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has received a cool $135 million more than the next-best-funded recipient, the State Education Fund. Because Reid, Faust and Bunker are prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act became law in 1998 and in 2002, 2004 and 2006 led to a series of bills targeting land in Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties jokes started circulating around Washington. The team that banned the mob from Vegas had replaced it with the Mormon mafia. 6 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

23 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun Except its crucible of power now lay as strongly in Nevada as in Utah. Cash from sales of marginal scrubland could buy new pipes. There remained the question of getting the water to put in them. The obvious choice was more of the basically free water from the Colorado River. For years, Bunker, Mulroy and their counterparts in Arizona had been pushing the Interior Department to force California to quit hogging the surpluses that relatively undeveloped states upriver let flow south every year. By 2004, they d succeeded and Nevada was about to claim some of the surplus. When the first bad year on the Colorado came in 1999, there was no panic. Sixty-five percent of the water used in Southwestern suburbs is used outdoors, most of it on lawns and car washing. Mulroy was hard at conservation work and leading the nation in cash for grass programs paying Las Vegas homeowners to rip out their lawns. The next year, 2000, was also bad on the Colorado River, as was We d had cyclical high- or low-flow years before, Mulroy says. Those three years were nothing out of the ordinary. In 2002, the Colorado experienced its worst year since record keeping began. Still, Mulroy didn t panic. By 2003, with total water storage on the Colorado River down by half, Mulroy went back to her board for another $5 million to pay Las Vegans to pull up their lawns. They could ride out another bad year. But in August 2003, an oceanographer at the California Institute of Technology issued a white paper commissioned by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The El Niño storms that had flushed the Colorado River in the 1980s and 90s, he said, will have more of a tendency to be El No Show or El Wimpo. Judging from ocean currents, he predicted there would be drought in the Colorado River watershed the next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. The Colorado, he said, had entered an epochal drought. The upshot for Nevada was that it had finally gotten its fair share of Colorado River surpluses just as those surpluses were drying up. Mulroy today may regret the news release calling the Metropolitan Water District a rogue agency and, shortly afterward, accusing the Caltech scientist of having accepted a bribe, but as experts began seconding his predictions, there was no time to wallow. By February 2004, Mulroy was back before her board asking for more millions to murder more lawn. 7 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

24 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun It was a stopgap at best. That September, Mulroy was in Washington. The Nevada delegation had the third land bill going through Congress, this time releasing land in Lincoln County. She rolled out her dilemma before Congress: She had killed more than 33 million square feet of ornamental turf, so much that she had driven down total water consumption in Las Vegas while the population kept ballooning at a rate of 6,000 or so a month. There were now 1.6 million people living in greater Las Vegas. Plan A on the Colorado River was a bust. Its reservoirs were half-empty. Plan B to take ground water from rural Nevada was now an urgent Plan A. Mulroy needed another clause dropped into another land bill, this one aimed at federal land releases and protections in Lincoln County. This time she needed Congress to instruct the Interior Department to clear passage for Las Vegas to run a pipeline across Lincoln County into the heart of rural Nevada. Before Reid became a senator, Nevada had every class of federal land except a national park. In 1986, in his next to last year as a congressman, Reid changed that. Others had tried during the previous 60 years, none harder than passionate park advocate Senator Alan Bible. Alan Bible represented Nevada for 20 years in the Senate and couldn t get it done! historian Michael Green says. The most logical setting for a park was Wheeler Peak, Nevada s second-highest mountain. Its outline could have jumped off the state seal. It had sweeping vistas of Utah to the east and Nevada to the west. Moreover, it had the kinds of attractions it takes to achieve park status: Lehman Caves, a Tiffany s of stalagmites and stalactites, and bristlecone pines, gnarly trees older than the pyramids. In good years, Wheeler s snowmelt is so generous that a hardworking cattle rancher can get in four crops of alfalfa before frost. During summer, cattle herds could forage across hundreds upon hundreds of miles of Interior-owned land. In 1985, Reid took up the cause for a park. The Sierra Club backed it. So did urban romantics. But as Reid got to Mount Wheeler, he soon learned that the last thing the pioneer-stock ranchers of White Pine County wanted was park rangers telling them where they could and could not graze their cattle. I didn t know the intensity that people had, Reid recalls. It was like it was some kind of a plot, you know, like putting fluoride in water. Local support grew for the idea after the closure of Kennecott Copper Mine drained White Pine County of hundreds of families. As Reid and others steadily pressed his case, an infestation of park rangers and a plague of tourists began to look like a business plan. Moreover, Green notes admiringly, Reid negotiated the kind of park that allowed grazing. With the formation of the Great Basin National Park in 1986, as Harry Reid ascended from the House to the Senate, Mr. Cleanface became Sierra Harry. 8 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

25 The Equation: No water, no growth - Las Vegas Sun After the passage of the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act in 1998, a succession of land bills introduced by Reid and the Nevada delegation churned through Congress every two years or so. With the passage of each, land deemed marginal or necessary for development was released while choice parcels of wilderness were selected for protected status: 440,000 acres in Clark County, 768,000 acres in Lincoln, 559,000 in White Pine. The Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area was created, Red Rock Canyon extended. The bills also cleared the way for a Las Vegas pipeline to take water from many millions more wild acres. As hope of new Colorado River water for Las Vegas evaporated in 2004 and Mulroy s hydrologists began dusting down the ground water maps of rural Nevada, it was clear that the sweetest reserves were in the two valleys fed by Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park. The people who stood to lose their livelihoods were the very ranchers whom Reid had persuaded many years before to back him in creating the park. Reid s early mentor, Mike O Callaghan, who was now editor of the Las Vegas Sun, sided with the ranchers. Six days before he died in March 2004, one of his last Where I Stand columns noted with disgust that the pipeline isn t a new idea... Big bucks and the drought have dragged it out of hiding again. O Callaghan then reprised his original stinging condemnation from We shouldn t allow our greed... to destroy the families who are descendants of men and women who made this a great state. People who have carved out a living in this dry climate deserve better treatment. Reid choked back tears at O Callaghan s funeral as he said, If you were right and fighting for it, Mike was by your side. Seven months later, the senator born in a Mojave shack with no running water backed Mulroy, not the ranchers championed by O Callaghan. Mulroy got her pipeline clause inserted into Reid s land bill that year. But just before the vote, Utah Senator Bob Bennett saw the need for another clause. The valley east of Wheeler Peak, a key pipeline target, is shared with Utah. Ranchers there were up in arms at the idea of their water being siphoned to Las Vegas. Bennett phoned the Utah state engineer asking that urgent language be placed in the bill. When the Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation and Development Act of 2004 passed, Mulroy got congressional clearance for her pipeline. But thanks to Bennett s clause, the act also stipulated that before Las Vegas could draw water from the valley shared with Utah, Utah would have to sign off on it. The Mormon mafia the Nevada Mormons had just heard from the fatherland. Continue to Part 4: Not this water 9 of 13 7/7/08 10:51 AM

26 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun LAS VEGAS SUN Quenching Las Vegas Thirst: Part 4: Not this water In a bid to save his family s livelihood after Las Vegas laid the groundwork for a water pipeline that could reduce his land to dust, a White Pine County rancher joins forces with Utah Sam Morris Springs surface around rancher Dean Baker on Baker Ranch in White Pine County. Baker has vehemently resisted Las Vegas designs on his water. By Emily Green, Las Vegas Sun Sun, Jun 22, 2008 (2 a.m.) When Southern Nevada Water Authority Manager Pat Mulroy appealed to Congress in 2004 to provide right of way for a pipeline to deliver ground water from the heart of Nevada to Las Vegas, Utah stirred. One of the two sweetest valleys targeted by Las Vegas sat bang on the state line between Nevada and Utah. And 1 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

27 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun not just Utah, but Brigham Young s chosen seat for the original Utah Territory. Utah quickly attached a condition to the bill: Before Nevada could draw from any shared water system, both states had to negotiate the amount. Or, as an incandescent Mulroy described it, Utah gained a veto on her pipeline project. Depending on how the states handled negotiations, what followed could either be a silky case of quid pro quo, or an all-out Western water war. Each side wanted something from the other. Las Vegas wanted to pump Great Basin ground water on the state line. Utah wanted to get a bill through Congress that would help hook up its booming southern city of St. George to the Colorado River. As negotiations over how much water Las Vegas could pull from the bistate basin began in September 2005, then kept going through 2006, an unmistakable threat was coming out of the Nevada delegation, led by Senator Harry Reid: If you want the hookup for St. George, give up the water for the Las Vegas pipeline. You scratch our back, we ll scratch yours. But Utah hesitated, unwilling to sign off. So in November 2006, shortly after Democrats won control of the Senate and Reid became majority leader-elect, the threat turned into action. One of the first acts of the Nevada senator s whip was to round up big Senate guns to oppose the St. George pipeline. Who knew until then what strong feelings Senators Dick Durbin, Illinois; Russ Feingold, Wisconsin; Robert Menendez, New Jersey; Joe Lieberman, Connecticut; Hillary Clinton, New York; Frank Lautenberg, New Jersey; John Kerry, Massachusetts; and Maria Cantwell, Washington, had about Southern Utah land issues? In December, the Utah bill failed to pass. If this was meant to intimidate Utah, it had the opposite effect. In February 2007, Utah s government appointed rancher Dean Baker to its negotiating team with Nevada. Baker Ranch sits smack dab on the state line, at the heart of Las Vegas pumping map. Though Baker was born in Utah, by virtue of where his farmhouse sits, he is technically a Nevadan, and as a Nevadan he had spent 18 years opposing the Las Vegas plan. He was the icon of rural opposition. Nevada and Reid and their parade of power senators had bullied the wrong state and the wrong rancher. Baker Ranch sits on what has always been some of the best water in the Great Basin. Snowmelt cascades onto the land every spring from Wheeler Peak, the second-highest mountain in Nevada. Catching the water on either side of Wheeler are two of the most fecund valleys in the region: Spring Valley to the west and Snake Valley to the east. Nevada to the west, Utah to the east. Moreover, Wheeler s snowmelt sustains pressure in a water table extending for hundreds of miles around, well into Nevada s White Pine County and east into Millard County, Brigham Young s choice for the seat of the Utah Territory. 2 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

28 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun To the Shoshone Indians, the mountain was already sacred when Spanish explorers, trappers and then Mormons came through. During the 19th century it went from Shoshone territory to part of Mexico, part of Brigham Young s Deseret, then the Utah Territory and finally, only after Nevada s border was tweaked repeatedly in the 1860s, it became Nevada by a whisker. By the time an Army cartographer named Wheeler showed up to map the area in 1869, a Mormon was farming in Snake Valley. In the 1870s, a man named Baker moved in. By 1892, Baker Ranch had a post office and a store and was the site of Goshute tribe fandangos celebrating the pine nut harvest. Baker s family started buying neighboring farms. Soon Baker Ranch was reputed to be the finest in White Pine County. It even sprouted a town called Baker. In the 1920s another Baker, Fred Baker, no relation to the then owner of Baker Ranch, showed up to work the hay harvest. Fred Baker was from Delta, a Utah farm town in Millard County, roughly 100 miles east. Delta farms have water from the Sevier River, but Delta itself is dry. In Baker, there was so much water from Mt. Wheeler that streams meandered through the alfalfa fields. A 1920s Snake Valley dude ranch brochure promised icy streams filled with angry trout along with ducks, deer, coyotes, mountain lions, wildcats, wolves and antelopes. The description was true, if the trout were indeed angry. Back in Delta, Fred Baker ran sheep, started an alfalfa seed business and was partner in a flight school that trained World War II veterans as crop-dusters. He was saving for his dream ranch in his dream valley. One of Baker s sons, Dean, was in college, unable to decide among majors pre-med, chemistry and business when the call came in 1959 from his father that a lease was available on his dream ranch, so perfect that it already bore their name. When Dean Baker left the University of Utah the following year, he had chosen a business degree expressly to help his father lease, then buy, Baker Ranch in Baker town. Half a century later, Dean Baker s uniform is farmer s denim, he lives in a small house and often eats cereal for dinner. His life cannot be measured in cars or granite countertops or vacations or clothes, but in land. Baker town is still little more than an intersection with a bar, a grocery store and a gas station. But Baker Ranch now consists of 12,000 deeded and water-rich acres. In addition, it has grazing rights to so much federal land that on the winter range, cattle from the same ranch might browse 50 miles from one another. To his neighbors, Dean Baker is a rancher s rancher, respected for his knowledge of seed and cattle genetics, his weed-free fields, and the care he takes of his workers at least the ones who don t leave jobs undone and him to count their cigarette butts. 3 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

29 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun At the monthly White Pine County Commission meetings, Baker s the lean, quiet, balding, watchful man who listens to hours of chatter and then sums up what s important with one simple comment. He s respected for that. All in all, an unlikely Lothario. So when you meet Baker s ex-wife at the truck stop down the road from his ranch, then find out that the woman in the pink T-shirt with Outrageous Older Woman on it is one of four women Baker has married, you are compelled to give the rancher s rancher a second glance. One evening late last summer, Baker kept a scheduled interview even after learning that his brother had died from a stroke after a fruitless period on a respirator. Frogs had started to chorus, an owl to hoot, and Baker was uncharacteristically elegiac. And vulnerable. It was as good a moment as any to try for an answer to a question that otherwise he probably would not have answered. What s with all the wives? I wasn t a very good husband, no matter how hard I worked at it, he said. It turns out that his first wife, whose family owned a summer home near the ranch, had been accustomed to servants and the good life in Southern California before marrying Baker. The marriage lasted 18 years. His first wife bore him four children before deciding that she needed more than a small ranch house with a gas station behind it. According to Wife Number Two down at the truck stop, Baker s passion is flying the Piper J-3 Cub that he uses to reconnoiter those 12,000 acres, sometimes flying under power lines. He loves his ranch second, she says, and his wives third. The second marriage lasted 10 years. The third marriage he won t talk about. Glancing at his fourth wife, the woman pretending to read in the next room, he added, But I appreciate Barbara and I m not going to let her get away. Looking back, he thinks he never really learned how to talk to girls in high school, where, as one of only two non-mormons in a tightly knit Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints community, dating was effectively off limits. He focused on farming instead, mastering the most perilous art of all in Great Basin ranching: developing Mt. Wheeler s often elusive springs, digging irrigation ditches and hauling water to cattle or getting cattle to water. Water rights in Nevada are awarded by the state engineer. Applicants file for rights, and the engineer hears the cases and any protests. Within eight months of receiving the transcripts and hearing the last protests, decisions are issued. The amount of water that might be awarded is directly related to how much the state engineer calculates will be replenished by annual snowmelt, and whether awarding this water will affect existing holders of water rights. In 1989, when the Las Vegas Valley Water District first applied for rights in Snake Valley, it was part of an 4 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

30 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun unprecedented mass filing, reportedly putting dibs on half of the untapped reserves in the state. The two basins fed by Wheeler Peak held the sweetest prospects. Rounded off, Southern Nevada Water Authority applied for 90,000 acre-feet in Spring Valley, 50,000 acre-feet in Snake. Baker was flabbergasted by the number for Snake Valley. How could Las Vegas imagine that he had somehow missed so much water that it could cover 50,000 acres to a foot deep? Of this he was sure: Pulling the amount of water Las Vegas wanted would suck dry the springs underlying this Northern Nevada cold desert. As his neighbors across the county cried Chinatown, Baker had a show-me-the-water response. He wanted a top-to-bottom audit of local water: what came in from Wheeler s snowmelt, what went out and how much was left. But those concerns seemed moot by 1995 because Las Vegas had all but backed off its rural ground water plan, focusing instead on getting more water from the Colorado River. Then in 2003, as Las Vegas weathered the fourth year of drought on the Colorado, the White Pine County Commission got a call from the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Would White Pine County like to send a man named Dean Baker to be a stakeholder in the water authority s Integrated Water Planning Advisory Committee? On the committee, they could work out Las Vegas water needs together. They were all Nevadans. When Baker heard the news, he decided that it could mean only one thing. Las Vegas was now truly coming after his water. Baker gathered his sons together. I said, I have to know if any of you want to sell, he recalls. Not a one of them did. Baker s stepson from his second marriage, Gary Perea, was on the White Pine County Commission at the time. While Baker s sons worked the ranch, Baker asked Perea to attend the meetings with him. Baker would fly down. At the first meeting, a jovial, silver-haired man slipped into the seat next to Baker and, according to Baker, announced, I m going to sit next to you for the next two years. Baker had had a marriage that amounted to less. The new companion was Richard Bunker. A former Clark County manager, former head of the Gaming Control Board, former casino executive and one of the country s top gaming lobbyists, Bunker s crowning title from newspaper columns was water king. Since using his influence to get Mulroy appointed head of the water district in 1989, Bunker had also become chairman of Nevada s Colorado River Commission, the state s water wholesaler to Las Vegas. 5 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

31 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun There was only one thing that Richard Bunker could possibly want from Dean Baker. Baker Ranch has rights to nearly 40,000 acre-feet of water a year, or roughly a seventh of Las Vegas entire allocation from the Colorado River. Richard went everywhere that I went, Baker says of the next 13 months. I got a newspaper, he got a newspaper. I got the distinct feeling he was assigned to me. Baker and Perea watched, listened and rarely spoke. Then Baker noticed the water authority setting up a finance committee to talk about funding the pipeline. He finally had a point to make. You also need to set up an independent committee to study the hydrology and see if the water is available, Baker said. They ignored it, Perea says. They just moved on. When the Southern Nevada Water Authority released a 2005 report summing up the collective deep thoughts from these meetings, it included a letter from Baker reprising his request. But tucked in next to it was a rebuttal from the executive secretary of the AFL-CIO, saying, I think we will learn a lot more about basin impacts once we start stressing ground water basins. In other words, let pumping begin and see what happens. Soliciting the opinion of a union leader about rural ground water only sounds crazy. Scientifically, it might be. Politically, however, it tracked nicely. As Perea recalls, The thing I kept hearing was that MGM Mirage employed more people than lived in White Pine County. By January 2006, Las Vegas was ready to begin the legal process of turning its make-or-break 1989 applications into real water. The first hearing would be for Wheeler s water flowing into the basin next to Baker s, Spring Valley. The dream scenario for Las Vegas would have been to persuade Perea and the rest of the White Pine County Commission to withdraw their protests before the state engineer s official cutoff date of June So Bunker and Mulroy started in. He played good cop, she played bad. Bunker visited White Pine County. He looked up Perea and called on Baker. According to Bunker, he and Baker rode to Baker Ranch together. During that visit, Bunker urged, Dean, don t dig in. Bunker came back to Las Vegas reporting, Dean has a huge mental block about this whole thing. Good cop failed. Bad cop succeeded. Mulroy sent observers to White Pine County Commission meetings, fully aware that open meeting laws meant that the commission could not strategize how to fight Las Vegas without her representative in the room. In January 2006, Mulroy opened a field office in Ely, the seat of White Pine County. 6 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

32 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun The two sides maneuvered. The commission extended an offer to Mulroy to provide relief water to Las Vegas to see out the drought on the Colorado, but insisted on a deal stipulating that Las Vegas not become dependent on White Pine ground water. Las Vegas refused. The commission asked for an independent body to be put in charge of pumping. Las Vegas refused. Mulroy put a $12 million offer on the table as recompense for any loss of revenue to the region and to cover any pumping damage. White Pine County s economic development officer crunched the offer and found the $12 million wouldn t be enough to cover the loss of farming, hunting and tourism income, not to mention the pumping effects. The White Pine County Commission refused. By that point, however, Mulroy was making another move. In July 2006, a month after the deadline lapsed for White Pine County to withdraw its protest, she announced the purchase of the huge Spring Valley Robison Ranch for $22 million. Soon, almost every ranch in Spring Valley was in negotiation with Las Vegas, and the sales were going too fast to count: Harbecke, Phillips, Bransford, Wahoo, El Tejon, Huntsman. The ranchers figured that once a big city started pumping and the water table fell, they would have no way to keep their alfalfa irrigated or water troughs full. Their ranches would all be worthless. Better to get out at the front end. As one of them explained as she wept with shame in a local grocery store, she had no choice. None of them did. Just why Las Vegas spent $78 million and counting to buy the ranches is a subject of debate. Mulroy said she did it to preserve the ranching lifestyle. Because water rights are assigned for a specific purpose, to keep that newly acquired ranch water in the short term, the Southern Nevada Water Authority had to enter the alfalfa and cattle business. Now if Las Vegas pumping caused damage in the valley, the only ones to complain would be Mulroy s hired ranch hands. Moreover, noted Dean Baker, Las Vegas could use the Spring Valley ranches surface water to keep the basin looking pretty and green, at least for a while, to show that Mulroy s pump-and-see approach worked. One basin over from Spring Valley, Dean Baker had no idea how much his Snake Valley ranch was worth to Las Vegas. He had nearly twice the land and three times the water of Spring Valley s Robison Ranch, which Las Vegas had just purchased for $22 million. He had no doubt that Las Vegas would buy if he offered to sell. He also knew that staying meant the fight of his life. 7 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

33 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun As the White Pine County Commission went ahead in September 2006 protesting the Spring Valley applications before Nevada s state engineer without the Spring Valley ranchers with it, Baker s stepson Perea had one last move in mind. The commission would appeal to the good graces of Senator Reid. White Pine County had history with Reid. In 1985, then congressman Reid had sat at Dean Baker s kitchen table. He was there to talk about creating a national park out of Wheeler Peak. At first, Baker was opposed. He was worried about grazing and water rights. Reid listened and, Baker now concedes, He worked diligently. When the act creating the Great Basin National Park passed the next year, Reid saw to it that grazing rights were protected. So was Baker s water. An ebullient Reid phoned Baker from Washington, shouting, We did it! It s a done deal! Then in 2005, Reid returned to Baker for the opening of a visitors center for Great Basin National Park. He was no longer an idealistic young congressman, but a world-weary senator, and on that day in particular fierce and frustrated after learning of the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O Connor, who as a moderate conservative was a swing vote on the right-tilting court. To his consternation, the group waiting for a private meeting was not there to thank him for the park, or the new multimillion-dollar visitors center. Instead, his former park allies now stood with the ranchers. Reid s normal speaking voice is so soft and low, listeners usually strain to hear him. But when a former volunteer challenged him over the Las Vegas pumping plan, Reid roared, I will not let my legacy be the rape of White Pine County! Seven weeks later, aides announced that Reid had seen a doctor about a transient ischemic attack, or small stroke. The following year, as the White Pine County Commission fought and lost in the battle with Mulroy over who would control the Las Vegas pumps planned for Spring Valley ranches, Reid aides returned to the region. They bore drafts of a sweeping new land bill for White Pine County. This was the latest in a series of bills that, led by Reid, had been putting federal land in Nevada on the auction block, county by county, from south to north. High among the beneficiaries of the three previous land bills had been the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which received 10 percent of the proceeds from federal land sales. Land bills also deal with water and White Pine County wanted the new bill to include provisions for a water study that would be much more thorough than the water audit then under way. The county wanted a study modeling what would happen when Las Vegas started pumping. Reid s aides stalled, dwelling instead on other issues such as recreational vehicle access and tribal concerns. Early on we were told, Let s take care of these other issues. We ll deal with water later, Perea says. 8 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

34 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun Later meant never. Unbeknown to White Pine County, it was now but a pawn on a much larger chessboard being run in Washington by Reid and Marcus Faust, a powerful D.C. resource lobbyist working for Mulroy. The battle was no longer Southern Nevada versus Northern Nevada, but Nevada versus Utah. Baker s boyhood friends across the state line in Millard County, Utah, were aghast as their own congressional delegation looked split over whether to sacrifice their water to Las Vegas. The Utah delegation also had a land bill in the works. Modeled on Reid s Nevada original, this bill would sell some federal land for development, designate some land to wilderness and secure passage of yet another pipeline, this one from the Colorado River to booming St. George. The Utah bill had problems, not the least that Utahans statewide had begun debating far more publicly than Nevadans ever did about the cost and pace of development in the hot desert. More water for St. George meant fuel for developers. Slow growth advocates wanted to block the pipeline. Nonetheless, a tacit understanding had emerged between the Utah and Nevada delegations. Nevada would back Senator Bennett s Utah land bill and Utah would back Reid s latest Nevada one in White Pine County. Except Southern Nevada had a slightly different version of quid pro quo in mind. In July 2006, freshly victorious after defeating the White Pine County Commission and buying up the ranches of Spring Valley, Mulroy was in Utah, personally delivering the message to the editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune. The longer Utah delayed approval of Las Vegas water withdrawals from Snake Valley, she said, the more uncomfortable it will become for Utah. If they can do it to another state, they can have it done to them, too. There was no other construction to put on it than: If Utah gave Las Vegas what it wanted from Snake Valley, then her friend Senator Reid might help with them with their bill and their pipeline to St. George. Even Mulroy s fans shook their heads. Had the woman who gave up dreams of a job with the State Department to rise instead in the Las Vegas water world just poked old Deseret with a sharp stick? She had. The Utah negotiating team did not give Mulroy what she wanted from Snake Valley. In the closing days of 2006, over frantic protests from Perea, Reid slipped the White Pine County land bill through as a rider on the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of There was no provision for the pumping impact study requested by the White Pine County Commission. Senator Bennett s land bill containing the request for right of way for the pipeline to St. George was left behind in committee. As gratifying as sucker punching Utah might have been, it only worsened prospects for a quick settlement over 9 of 15 7/7/08 10:52 AM

35 Not this water - Las Vegas Sun Snake Valley water for Las Vegas. The failure of Bennett s land bill in Washington proved most excellent tinder to inflame argument back home in Utah over whether St. George should be developed in the first place. Then, as Reid got the White Pine County land bill passed without the pumping impact study and against the wishes of the White Pine County Commission, an already mad Millard County got madder. Memory runs deep in the small towns of central Nevada and Utah. Millard County sits just across the Utah state line from White Pine County. Spring Valley was settled by handcart Mormons out of Millard County s capital of Fillmore. Before Brigham Young lost his empire, White Pine County was Millard County. The Millard County Commission went directly to the Utah Legislature and demanded that a rancher be appointed to Utah s negotiating team, which was hammering out how to divide Snake Valley s water with Nevada. In February 2007, the state Legislature resolved it should happen. But the Millard County Commission didn t want a Utah rancher. It wanted a Nevadan the rancher s rancher, Dean Baker. As it happened, Millard County Commissioner John Cooper knew Baker. The Bakers and Coopers went to school together. That Cooper is a devoted Mormon and Baker is a gentile didn t matter. The four wives didn t matter. To Cooper s mind, Baker was born in Millard County, born a Delta boy. They knew his character, his father s character, his brother s and his sons. But nothing in those lifelong associations had impressed them more than the stand that Dean Baker took against Las Vegas. No one has more integrity than Dean Baker, Cooper says. Dean Baker owns 40,000 acre-feet from that aquifer. Can you imagine how much that would be worth to the Southern Nevada Water Authority? Yet he is unyielding in his right to use that water to ranch. Baker s addition to the Utah team would reunite him with his constant shadow from Mulroy s press on Spring Valley. As it happened, the Nevada governor s special representative to Utah was none other than Las Vegas water king Richard Bunker. Continue to Part 5: Owens Valley is the model of what to expect

36 Owens Valley is the model of what to expect - Las Vegas Sun LAS VEGAS SUN Quenching Las Vegas thirst: Part 5: Owens Valley is the model of what to expect As Las Vegas policymakers eye the water beneath Nevada, a scientific debate erupts over the possible effects Sam Morris Hydrogeologist Timothy Durbin was recruited by the Southern Nevada Water Authority in 2001 to help predict the effects of ground water pumping in the Great Basin Desert. The former U.S. Geological Survey employee found pumping could result in a significant drop in the area s water table. By Emily Green, Las Vegas Sun Sun, Jun 29, 2008 (2 a.m.) The raw glory of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts is difficult to imagine from the paved fantasyland of Las Vegas. 1 of 20 7/7/08 10:53 AM