Water chief defends Vegas mayor By VICTOR MORALES, Staff Writer
Sunday, February 24, 2008 12:24 AM PST
Comments made by the mayor of Las Vegas saying Imperial Valley farmers will make their fields bone dry in order to irrigate his city in the event of a grave water crisis was not insensitive, Las Vegas’ top water chief said.
Pat Mulroy, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which delivers water to more than 1.8 million customers and 40 million annual visitors in Las Vegas and other southern Nevada cities, defended the mayor’s comments in an interview with Imperial Valley Press on Friday.
She said Mayor Oscar Goodman’s comments, which have triggered a usually suppressed debate among Western states over water rights, were a reaction to a scientific study suggesting Lake Mead would dry up in 13 years. Many regard that study as an alarmist view.
“You got to put it into context. … There are severe concerns in Nevada (concerning water shortages),” Mulroy said. “It was not meant as an insensitive comment. Unfortunately it has lent itself to be interpreted that way.”
Another interpretation, Mulroy admitted to, was how “Sin City’s” populace perceives the Imperial Valley’s importance in the food chain.
“Las Vegas doesn’t understand the connections to the food supply,” she admitted when questioned about the prevailing attitudes in the sprawling city regarding agricultural areas.
So perhaps, when Goodman uttered what farmers here regard as “fighting words,” it was a reflection of the kind of prevalent atmosphere outside the Valley.
“The Imperial Valley farmers will have their fields go fallow before our spigots run dry,” Goodman told reporters at a news conference Feb. 14.
Goodman is not the only one who appears to believe the Imperial Valley’s water is expendable.
Opponents to the Nevada Water Authority’s plan to extract groundwater north of Las Vegas have pushed to buy out farms in the Valley as an “alternative,” Mulroy said.
Imperial Irrigation District spokesman Kevin Kelley said that kind of reasoning is typical.
“It is a kind of disconnect that agricultural areas like ours runs into. … We don’t think it’s an accident that the mayor of Las Vegas has immediately seized on the notion that fallowing in the Imperial Valley is the quick fix to an urban water shortage in Las Vegas,” he said.
The Imperial Valley grows an estimated 90 percent of the nation’s winter vegetables. In 2006 the Valley produced $1.6 billion worth of agricultural products, according the Imperial County Farm Bureau.
“Without a doubt Las Vegas is enjoying the food grown in California with the water they want,” said Nicole M. Rothfleisch, executive director of the Farm Bureau.
Mulroy herself has championed water interests lately, she said.
“I’ve been going around the community saying, ‘You need to slow down here.’ … You are severely going to cut the food supply with that kind of thinking,” she said of the opposition to extract ground water.
She said the Nevada authority is “in no way targeting the IID.”
But even Mulroy has insinuated in the past the possibility of buying water from California, presumably from Imperial Valley farmers. In 2004 Mulroy reportedly approached then-U.S. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton with a proposal to buy Colorado River water directly from farmers in California and Arizona, according to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The IID is already transferring a combined 370,000 acre-feet of water to coastal urban areas and the Coachella Valley per year under the Quantification Settlement Agreement, the nation’s largest water transfer program. The IID is in its fifth year of the program and has reluctantly made those transfers mostly through the controversial method of fallowing farmers’ fields.
“We are emphatic about wanting to get out of fallowing as soon as possible and improve (water quantity) through active conservation,” Kelley said.
And last year the Imperial Irrigation District entered into an agreement that was intended to deflect water conflicts. That agreement included Mulroy’s Nevada Water Authority.
Those compromises by the Imperial Valley have made a good impression on other Western water agencies.
“We understand that there are urban needs but we have to meet in the middle, and we have demonstrated that,” Rothfleisch said.
Mulroy said the cooperation from the IID in a reservoir project on the All-American Canal that served Las Vegas was a good thing and that there was a limit to getting water from other states.
“We can’t keep on looking to California as an alternative,” she said Friday.
Despite her present harmonious tone, a line in the sand may have been drawn by Goodman’s comments.
“If his purpose was to get our attention, he succeeded,” Kelley said.
Goodman has not responded to requests from the Imperial Valley Press to clarify his remarks.
“Thank you for your request. Unfortunately, Mayor Goodman is not available for comment,” the mayor’s spokeswoman, Elena Owens, wrote in an e-mail Friday.
" like Vegas always says "I Bet"the mayor wants something that Pat has,and Pat has something the mayor of Vegas wants! "
zanelisk wrote on Feb 24, 2008 5:53 PM:
" We all know that supply and demand dictate markets. Ironic isn't it that when people are paying $10.00 a gallon for milk to feed their babies because Nevada water interests have made it impossible to irrigate Alfalfa, that all those mega-hotel,casinos (with their beautiful fountains) will dry up because no one can afford to go to Vegas. If you do go, don't expect the salad bars to be very well stocked....but they will be expensive. "
ricocafe99 wrote on Feb 24, 2008 9:50 AM:
" The man's name is Mulroy... notice that her name is similar to Mulwray, the name of the man who engineered the crooked water deal for Los Angeles in the film "Chinatown"...that is an omen to the Imperial Valley. "
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chucktaylor80 wrote on Feb 24, 2008 7:19 PM: