Sunday, July 15, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal

COYOTE SPRING VALLEY: Plans might threaten river

Pumping groundwater could dry up springs, endanger species

Las Vegas, Nevada - MOAPA VALLEY NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE -- Clear, warm water bubbles year-round from the dusty earth at the head of the Moapa Valley, running downhill in narrow streams to the Muddy River and Lake Mead.

Towering groves of fan palms shade the only natural home of the Moapa dace, an endangered species whose numbers have dropped to an estimated 1,000 tiny fish in the crystalline headwaters of the little river north of Las Vegas.

The survival of the dace and their habitat will become the focus of intense scrutiny in Carson City on Monday. Nevada's state engineer plans to consider a Las Vegas Valley Water District request to pump water for more than 120,000 people a year from wells in the undeveloped Coyote Spring Valley, a few miles northwest of this 60-acre refuge.

Federal parks and wildlife officials have protested the proposal, saying pumping groundwater for urban growth could dry up dozens of springs fed by a vast, poorly understood aquifer that lies beneath much of eastern Nevada. The dace -- and Moapa's largely Mormon, historically agricultural community -- could be harmed, officials and some local residents fear.

The fight is expected to continue next month when state engineer Hugh Ricci considers attorney Harvey Whittemore's application for even more Coyote Spring Valley water. Whittemore, a casino, liquor and tobacco lobbyist with stakes in oil, natural gas, land development and soft-drink bottling, hopes to build a master-planned golf-course community in the Coyote Spring Valley in coming years. He has asked for permission to withdraw water to serve more than 480,000 people from wells on his property, although he says he could complete the project with less.

"If you stick a lot of straws here you could seriously affect the flow in the Muddy River," said Bruce Lund, a Nature Conservancy manager who oversees the wildlife refuge for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "The decisions made today, the effects may not happen for decades, and you can't reverse them."

The Moapa dace's numbers plunged from between 3,000 and 4,000 after predatory, non-native tilapia made their way into the Muddy River system in the early 1990s. Lund, local federal agencies and some local residents are trying to assure the fish's survival by preserving the river and its banks, perhaps for eventual inclusion in a protected, publicly accessible area stretching from the wildlife refuge to the shore of Lake Mead.

Whittemore and the water district pledge they will never pump enough water to put the dace and their habitat at risk.

"At no point in the development would we ever reach a point where the aquifer would be overappropriated or stretched beyond what it could do," Whittemore said.

The water district, National Park and U.S. Fish and Wildlife services late last week were about to strike a deal in which the federal agencies would drop their protests against the district. The water district would in turn agree to closely monitor the effects of their pumping upon the springs, ceasing if they began to be affected.

Whittemore said he plans to conduct a similar monitoring program, developing his community in stages and halting building if his pumping affects the Muddy Springs and the river they feed.

But many remain unconvinced.

"What happens if 10 years from now, you get 25,000 people up there and someone goes, `Oops, sorry, we made a mistake and all the warm springs are going to dry up'?" asked landscape designer Don Davis, a fifth-generation Southern Nevadan who moved from Las Vegas to a sprawling property on the banks of the Muddy River.

Central to the debate is a massive aquifer lying beneath parts of at least four Nevada counties. While many Western aquifers are relatively small, shallow basins of sandy soil permeated by snow and rain runoff from neighboring mountain ranges, Whittemore and the district want to tap what scientists call the regional carbonate aquifer.

It's undisputed that vast quantities of fresh water run through fissures in the ancient limestone seabed stretching from White Pine County south to Lake Mead, thousands of feet below shallower aquifers. There may be millions of acre-feet, enough to dwarf even the annual flow of the Colorado River. What's unclear, however, is how much snowmelt and rainwater annually enter the regional carbonate aquifer, and how much exit it through springs and seeps.

Without that knowledge, opinions vary widely about whether pumping water from the Coyote Spring Valley will affect the Muddy Springs and the river they feed.

"It's very sketchy as far as what's available," said Chuck Pettee, chief of the National Park Service's water rights branch. "The concern is that the regional groundwater aquifer is the source of flow for these springs, and if you eliminate the water from the aquifer then you're very likely to reduce or eliminate the flow from these springs."

Whittemore's consultants have produced a computer-generated model showing that as much as 120,000 acre-feet of water a year flow through the carbonate aquifer beneath the Coyote Spring Valley. Accordingly, any development there could use as much as 85,000 acre-feet a year without significantly affecting the carbonate aquifer or Muddy Springs, Whittemore said.

"We are not going to create a situation where the resource is being impacted downstream," he said.

A water district model shows, however, that 60 years of Whittemore's proposed pumping could reduce the Muddy Springs' 36,000 acre-foot a year flow by between 2,700 and 5,860 acre-feet a year. The district's own 27,512-acre-foot a year proposal could cut 1,800 acre-feet from the springs' annual flow, their model shows.

An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, enough to serve a family of four for a year.

Water district officials warned that their model is highly conservative and based on little concrete information about the carbonate aquifer.

But federal officials say both the district and Whittemore may be overly optimistic about the amount of water in the carbonate aquifer.

"Simply put, our concern is that the amounts of water that are being applied for exceed the available water not only in Coyote Springs Valley basin but also for the interconnected basins that make up the regional carbonate systems," Pettee said.

The Coyote Spring Valley already has been the subject of complex deals that left Whittemore and the water district with thousands of acre-feet of water that the state engineer granted them permission to pump. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water district's parent agency, three years ago stuck a deal for the district to buy 7,500 acre-feet of Whittemore's permitted water rights for $25 million. The lobbyist retained enough water to develop the first stage of his community, including two Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses, a "village center" and as many as 2,000 homes.

Whittemore said this week that he sold water essential to his development in order to fund his purchase of his Coyote Spring Valley land, and to strike a tone of cooperation with Las Vegas water officials. Water authority officials say the purchase gave them an invaluable guaranteed water supply, along with wells and land needed to extract it.

It remains unclear how the water will be made available for use in Las Vegas. The deal troubles Robert Tretiak, vice president of the Nevada Well Owners Association and a frequent critic of the authority's efforts to reduce private groundwater pumping in the Las Vegas Valley.

"I was deeply concerned, personally, that the water authority would spend that much money and give that much of a profit to a guy for water that they can't even use today," Tretiak said.

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Note from CR Editor: The place: Moapa Valley - we used to swim there in the warm springs - the little fish that are mentioned swam happily around our feet in the streams between the two pools where many people came to picnic and enjoy swimming in the pools.  The fish were there for as long as I can remember - and they did just fine.  I remember the furor when they closed those pools down when I was a teenager - naming the 'endangered' fish as reason. SF