The location of a proposed personal and RV storage project off Airport Road, the third storage project heard by the Planning Commission in as many months.
I recently attended the Nevada Water Resources Association Annual Conference. My key takeaways are that the average Nevadan knows little of Nevada water law, policy and science, and the experts are only slowly becoming more adept at communicating their advanced knowledge of the same. Water users across all sectors are doing some very innovative work in water conservation and creative recharge to our surface and underground resources. The mining industry, particularly those players with sites along the Humboldt, have finally sprung to life in terms of making a more public facing effort to understand and inform about their impacts to our environment and water resources from dewatering. State regulators seem well meaning and technically very qualified; but whether through fear or design, their plans to rein-in over use of groundwater seem off to a slow start and anemic at the very best. Department of Water Resources has finally completed the Herculean task of mapping the state’s hydrological basins, the historic and current water use in each are included; but for reasons still unknown, mine dewatering has not been factored in.
The new buzzword at DWR is conjunctive management. For the uninitiated, that means the combined, collaborative management of both surface and groundwater, something that seems a no-brainer to most of us, but is a new management concept to state regulators, and because of this, has led to many decades of over permitting groundwater pumping and many severely over appropriated basins. Our state Supreme Court has recently given regulators the muscle necessary to make prudent decisions regarding water use. It remains to be seen if they’ll use their new authority or punt…
My life as a rancher whose operation possesses senior water rights within our Valley has forced me to become fluent in water law and practical water usage. I’ve also served as a director of the Humboldt River Basin Water Authority for the past five years. The collection of members on that board have significantly improved my knowledge base in water management.
If you don’t have a profession or vocation that requires the regular use of Nevada’s very valuable and limited water resources, you may have already nodded off or stopped reading. You really shouldn’t. Nevada is our nation’s driest state and everything we do is impacted by water. If you like flush toilets and indoor plumbing, the plentiful wildlife in our mountains and valleys, boating or fishing, or eating locally grown food, you have a vested interest in how we as a State, manage and use our water resources.
As much as most people don’t want to think about the basic infrastructures of modern life, especially in Nevada, we’re quite literally a few drops away from catastrophe. The good news is that most everyone involved in water policy for our state are constantly innovating and moving us forward in terms of truly sustainable use and common sense conservation. I think perhaps the greatest impediment to feeling positive about water policy in Nevada moving forward, is not climate change, drought or even over pumping for agriculture; but, convincing the perpetual motion machine that is Las Vegas, that continued growth is not a sustainable policy and that there are limits to what you can buy, steal or trade. But that my friends, is an essay for another day.
Kris Stewart is a rancher in Paradise Valley, Nevada.