Lawsuit on LV’s water siphoning to be heard

Coalition of plaintiffs dismayed by OK of plan

Three years and two dozen motions later, a federal court in Las Vegas will hear a lawsuit Monday that seeks to block the Southern Nevada Water Authority from siphoning groundwater from a 300-mile swath of eastern Nevada.

A coalition of local governments, tribes and environmental groups in Nevada and Utah sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Department of the Interior in February 2014 for granting a right of way to the massive network of pumps and pipes the water authority wants to build to deliver more water to Las Vegas.

The authority one day hopes to pump up to 84,000 acre-feet of water a year — enough to supply roughly 170,000 average Las Vegas homes — from Cave, Dry Lake and Delamar valleys in Lincoln County and Spring Valley in White Pine County.

There is no specific timeline for when the multibillion-dollar project might be built or when the water might be needed.

‘Ruthless exploitation’

Plaintiffs in the case accuse federal regulators of ignoring environmental laws and tribal trust obligations when they granted the authority permission to build more than 250 miles of water pipelines across public land.

The lawsuit specifically cites threats to rare species of fish, snails, frogs and toads — some of them already under federal protection — that could be wiped out by largescale groundwater pumping by the authority. The plaintiffs argue that the project also threatens to damage or fragment prime habitat for the greater sage grouse, the chickenlike bird once under consideration for endangered species status.

“At the heart of the lawsuit is the protection and defense of America’s public land from the ruthless exploitation by the Southern Nevada Water Authority,” said Rob Mrowka, a senior scientist for the Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “The water authority’s plan to drain ancient aquifers would cause catastrophic changes to public lands across eastern Nevada.”

But officials for the water authority, which joined the government’s side of the case in April 2014, say