Nevada official worries about water ruling effect
February 7th, 2010 by Bob Davidowhttp://www.rgj.com/article/20100207/NEWS07/100207004/1003/CARSON/Nevada-official-worries-about-water-ruling-effect
February 7, 2010
Nevada official worries about water ruling effect
By HENRY BREAN
Las Vegas Review-Journal
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Depending how it is interpreted, a recent Nevada Supreme Court ruling in a key water case could lead to “chaos” for thousands of water rights awarded over a 55-year span, the state’s chief water regulator said.
If the Jan. 28 ruling means nullifying every application for water that took more than a year to for a state decision, Acting State Engineer Jason King warned that as many as 14,500 water rights issued between 1947 and 2002 could be affected.
“I can’t even fathom it,” King said. “There would just be so much litigation. It would be gridlock.”
The decision brought a flood of paperwork to the state engineer’s office in Carson City in the first week after the ruling. Officials said 200 new water rights applications came in from water managers seeking to guard against potential fallout from the court’s action.
That was about 50 more applications than the state engineer typically sees in a month.
The new filings essentially duplicate earlier applications called into question by the ruling because they were not acted on by the state within one year, as the law requires.
Most of the new filings came from the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which could be forced by the ruling to start over again as it seeks state permission to pump enough groundwater out of eastern Nevada to supply more than 250,000 Las Vegas area homes.
The authority refiled 86 of its pending applications on the day of the Supreme Court ruling and later added another 35.
In reversing a state court decision, the justices said Nevada law required the state engineer to have acted within one year on a massive 1989 filing that sought water rights for the Las Vegas area from across rural Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties.
Instead, the applications weren’t considered until more than a decade later, after many people who initially protested had died or moved away.
A law passed by the 2003 Legislature lets the state engineer extend the hearing process for municipal use applications. But the court said that law only applied to filings submitted after July 1, 2002.
Ultimately, the justices left it to a judge in a rural District Court to decide whether the water authority should be required to repeat the state review process for its applications from 1989.
The flood of new filings is a direct result of that uncertainty, water authority spokesman J.C. Davis said.
John Entsminger, deputy counsel for the authority, called it “prudent” for the agency to refile the applications. Some are for water rights that were granted and put to use years ago.
“I want to be clear: There’s nothing in the (Supreme Court’s) order that specifically says permits are implicated, but there’s also nothing that says they aren’t,” Entsminger said.
Late last week, Lincoln County and the private water marketing firm Vidler Water Co. filed 10 new applications in four basins they have teamed up to develop.
On Monday, the Virgin Valley Water District, which serves the Mesquite area, filed 51 applications and Washoe County filed 18.
The state engineer’s office charges $300 per application, so the recent activity will mean $50,000 in revenue for the state’s general fund and $10,000 in revenue for Nevada newspapers that will publish public notices of the filings.
Those notices will trigger a 30-day protest period. Only those who file protests and pay a $25 fee will be allowed to directly participate in any state hearings on the new filings.
King said the application fee and protest fee are set by state law, and are not refundable in the event the lower court decides the new round of filings was not necessary.
The state engineer and the water authority have about two more weeks to file a motion to have the state Supreme Court reconsider last week’s ruling.
King considers such a motion likely, if only to try to get the justices to clarify their decision.
“It just could have huge ramifications,” he said.










