Just in time for the Snake Valley Water Festival the Nevada Supreme Court issued two short orders on last week denying Southern Nevada Water Authority’s and the State Engineer’s petitions for writs of mandamus.
This ruling constitutes a major victory for opponents of SNWA’s Pipeline Project, led by White Pine County and the Great Basin Water Network and local Native American tribes. By the same token, this ruling is a defeat for SNWA and the State Engineer, and their efforts to circumvent sound science.
The Supreme Court’s orders follow its February order dismissing SNWA’s and the SE’s original appeals. Now SNWA and the State Engineer Jason King are in the position of having to comply with the Judge Estes’s order and the requirement to demonstrate that SNWA’s proposed groundwater mining and export operation will be sustainable and will not cause impermissible impacts on the environment and existing water rights holders, such as ranchers, farmers and local business people.
The out manned and outgunned ranchers, farmers and just plain folks of rural Nevada and Utah won their third major victory against the Las Vegas city slickers of the SNWA when the Nevada Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of District Judge Robert Estes ruling that voided the Las Vegas water grab last year.
Estes ruled in December 2013 that State Engineer Jason King had failed to establish adequate criteria for protecting the residents of eastern Nevada and western Utah from damages that might result from drawing down the groundwater to supply the Southern Nevada Water Authority with 84,000 acre-feet a year of groundwater from SPRING, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys.
The state supreme court ruled that since Estes sent the case back to the state engineer the case was not appealable — yet.
However the language Estes used to void the water rights made it clear that getting the rights back for Las Vegas could be very difficult.
“There are no objective standards to determine when mitigation will be required and implemented,” the judge wrote. “The Engineer has listed what mitigation efforts can possibly be made, i.e., stop pumping, modifying pumping, CHANGE location of pumps, drill new wells … but does not cite objective standards of when mitigation is necessary.”
Estes concluded that if “it is premature to set triggers and thresholds, it is premature to grant water rights.”
“If the Nevada State Engineer lacks information to set concrete triggers for monitoring and preventing or mitigating harmful impacts, then SNWA’s applications must be denied,” said Abby Johnson, president of GBWN. “The District Court decision reversed the State Engineer’s decision on all of SNWA’s water rights applications in Spring, Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar Valleys. The Supreme Court’s ruling requires that the State Engineer and SNWA accept that decision, and confront the deficiencies that Judge Estes held must be corrected before any of SNWA’s water rights applications can be granted,” Johnson added.
“On a scale of one to ten this is a nine,” Johnson said in an interview with the High Desert Advocate.
“SNWA has had 25 years to provide basic information proving that its proposed project to pump and pipe water out of these rural valleys would be sustainable and comply with the most basic requirements of Nevada’s water law. The fact that they not only have failed to produce such evidence in all that time, but also have gone on record saying repeatedly that they cannot produce such evidence, only goes to show this misguided proposal never has been and never will be scientifically defensible or legally permissible,” declared GBWN’s attorney, Simeon Herskovits of Advocates for Community and Environment.
Rob Mrowka, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity said, “Once again, the natural heritage that makes Nevada great has been SAVED by the courts from the ill-conceived and short-sighted plans of the SNWA.”
“All of the science actually shows that SNWA’s plan to pump groundwater out of these rural valleys and pipe it down to the Las Vegas Valley simply will not be sustainable and cannot avoid destroying existing water rights and the environment in the vast affected area,” said GBWN’s Johnson.
The Supreme Court decision marks the fifth consecutive victory of GBWN and allied opponents of SNWA’s controversial proposed project over SNWA in the courts in a real live “David v. Goliath” battle.
The high court’s decision is just the latest setback for the Negas water grab. Until last summer northern Nevada water appeared to be ready to be pumped down south. But just as the pipeline was all but laid bad things began to happen to the bad guys from Sin City.
In addition to the Estes decision SNWA opponents scored a political victory of a sorts when Utah governor Gary Herbert In an 11th hour decision reversed himself and said he would not sign a controversial water-sharing agreement with Nevada that was strongly supported by the SNWA and strongly opposed by Utah ranchers and more recently by the LDS church.
“At the end of the day, when it comes down to those people who have the most to lose — it’s their water, their lifestyle, their livelihood — I can’t in good conscience sign the agreement,” he said. “It’s that simple.”
Finally that year the Goshute and Shoshone Tribes, and their allies took the fight to a NEW level, requesting that the Federal District Court of Nevada “void the validity” of the Bureau of Land Management’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Record of Decision (ROD) and “suspend and enjoin any operation on the right-of-way” pending full compliance with federal environmental laws and TRUST obligations to the Tribal Plaintiffs.
“These are standards that SNWA and the State Engineer themselves have repeatedly conceded, on the record, they cannot meet because the science does not support such conclusions,” said GBWN’s attorney, Simeon Herskovits of Advocates for Community and Environment.
“The Nevada Supreme Court’s rejection of SNWA’s and the State Engineer’s appeals, combined with Judge Estes’s ruling in district court, represents a victory for the people and environment of the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah including ranchers and farmers who are threatened with elimination by SNWA’s ill-considered, massive water grab,” said GBWN president Abby Johnson.
“This is one more nail in the coffin for SNWA’s pipeline and one more indication that protecting Snake Valley groundwater is the right thing to do and will succeed in the end,” said Steve Erickson of GBWN in Salt Lake City.
“We hope SNWA and the State Engineer will reconsider their prior efforts to ramrod this unsustainable and ultimately devastating groundwater mining project on ratepayers and taxpayers,” said Howard Watts III, communications specialist for GBWN.
This ruling does not necessarily represent the end of the case. SNWA and the State Engineer may well decide together to rush a remand proceeding and try again with more bogus pseudo-science. But they should be held accountable for having boxed themselves in by making repeated representations to both the Nevada District Court and Supreme Court that they cannot satisfy the standards Judge Estes held they must satisfy.