Sin City water grab pits Mammon against Mormons as West dries up

It’s Mammon versus Mormon as Las Vegas and its glittering towers of glass and greed seek to quench their growing thirst by draining billions of gallons of water from under the feet of ranchers whose cattle help feed the church’s poor.
The biblical battle across 275 miles of treeless ridges and baked salt flats comes as the western U.S. faces unprecedented droughts linked to climate change.
The surface of Las Vegas’s main source of water, Lake Mead, sits more than 100 feet below Hoover Dam’s spillways after reaching the lowest mark last summer since the dam was filled. As it seeks new sources, the city’s water supplier is waging a court fight over plans to suck as much as 27 billion gallons a year from the valley that is home to the Mormon ranch and its 1,750-head herd, as well as three other rural valleys.
Casino resorts, five of which are Southern Nevada’s largest commercial water users, labor unions and the developer of a 22,500-acre mini-city west of Las Vegas argue their future depends on the water supply that the church, Indian tribes and environmental groups say is needed by local communities.
The fight, likely to echo across the increasingly arid West, conjures up the Los Angeles water grab, made famous in the 1974 movie “Chinatown,” that turned the once prosperous Owens Valley into a dust bowl.
As cities including Denver and Phoenix look to secure water for growing populations and economies, the prospect of mega-droughts, more severe and sustained than any in the 20th Century, looms over Nevada’s court battle, with one pipeline opponent calling it the “poster child” for future showdowns.
The 7,000-acre Cleveland Ranch, established in Spring Valley in 1873 by Maine native Abner “Old Cleve” Cleveland and bought in 2000 by the Mormon Church, sits atop an aquifer a dozen-plus miles to the north of Route 50, known from postcards as “America’s Loneliest Highway.”
The ranch, owned by the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is worked by a combination of paid employees, church missionaries and other volunteers, according to a history of the ranch. The calves, after they are weaned, are shipped to an Idaho feed lot and then to a processing plant, where some of the meat is frozen or canned as stew and beef chunks for distribution around the world.
If the Southern Nevada Water Authority wins in court, its proposed groundwater project may leave the valley to sage brush and coyotes, according to lawyers for the church and environmentalists.
“This is a huge project that raises fundamental questions,” said Paul Hejmanowski, a lawyer for the church. “Can we sacrifice an ancient way of life for a growing metropolis?”
So far, the ranch and other project opponents have fended off Las Vegas, convincing a judge in 2013 that there was insufficient scientific evidence for the state engineer’s decision to award the water rights.
The Nevada Resorts Association, the Nevada AFL-CIO, representing members of 120 unions, and developer Howard Hughes Corp. have thrown their support behind the water authority’s and state engineer’s petitions to the state Supreme Court for help. A hearing before the court hasn’t been scheduled.
“There are no other alternatives available, and it would increase the region’s water security,” said Virginia Valentine, president of the casino and resort trade group. “Our infrastructure needs to be there.”
The five resorts – the Wynn Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay, Venetian, Bellagio and Caesars Palace – consumed 2.4 billion gallons in 2013, according to the water authority. Other large users include the golf and country clubs that surround Las Vegas, an area whose population has almost tripled since 1990 to 2 million.
The leisure and hospitality sector employs 28 percent of Nevada’s workforce and the taxes it pays make up 47 percent of the state’s general fund.
Those economics may doom Cleveland Ranch even if pipeline opponents have a good case, said Jeffrey Dintzer, a lawyer specializing in water-rights issues with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP in Los Angeles who isn’t involved in the dispute.
“Money talks,” Dintzer said. “Nevada gets a huge amount of its revenue from gaming.” Edvard Pettersson, Bloomberg