KVIG Informative

Ulysses S. Grant carved a reservation out of southeastern Nevada in 1873, built entirely around one river. A hundred and fifty-one years later, in 2024, a Nevada Supreme Court ruling over that same river’s groundwater settled how much control the state exercises over everyone who depends on it.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed an executive order on March 12, 1873, setting aside land in southeastern Nevada for the area’s Southern Paiute residents, according to the order’s text as compiled by the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. The order fixed the reservation’s boundary starting at the Colorado River’s north bank where Nevada’s eastern line meets it, running north to a point one mile above Muddy Springs, west to the 115th meridian, south to a matching parallel, and back east to the river.

The land Grant set aside sits in Moapa Valley, the historic floodplain of the Muddy River, about 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. As of a 2013 wetland management plan the Moapa Band of Paiutes filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Moapa River Indian Reservation covers 71,954 acres and was home to roughly 287 enrolled members, with about 180 living on the reservation itself.

The river running through that reservation has not stayed static. Two rounds of channel dredging, carried out roughly four decades before that 2013 filing to support agriculture and lower the water table, stripped out much of the Muddy River’s native willow and cottonwood habitat and left steep, erosion-prone banks in their place, according to the same EPA filing.

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The water beneath the valley north of the reservation is now the subject of Nevada’s longest-running groundwater dispute. Water-right holders in Coyote Springs Valley have pressed the Nevada State Engineer since 2001 to approve pumping large enough to supply a planned development for as many as 250,000 residents, according to a case summary published by the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas.

The State Engineer held those applications in abeyance under Order 1169 in 2001 pending pump tests, then denied hundreds of the permits under Order 1169A in 2012 after the tests showed the pumping would deplete the Muddy River and five connected groundwater basins, according to the same case summary. The office combined five basins into a single management unit under Order 1303 in 2019, then folded in a sixth basin under Order 1309 on June 15, 2020, capping combined groundwater pumping across what regulators now call the Lower White River Flow System at 8,000 acre-feet a year.

Nevada’s Division of Water Resources has said that cap exists to prevent the pumping from depleting the Muddy River and to protect the sole habitat of the Moapa dace, a federally endangered fish that survives only in the river’s warm spring sources near the reservation.

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Water-right holders challenged the State Engineer’s authority to manage the basins as one unit, and the fight reached the Nevada Supreme Court. On Jan. 25, 2024, the court ruled in Sullivan v. Lincoln County Water District, 140 Nev., Advance Opinion 4, that the State Engineer holds implied authority under Nevada Revised Statutes 533.085 to manage interconnected surface water and groundwater conjunctively and to combine basins for that purpose, reversing a lower court that had sided with the water-right holders.

Twenty-three years after the first pump-abeyance order and 151 years after Grant’s boundary put the Muddy River at the center of a reservation the Moapa Band never asked for, Nevada’s high court has now settled who decides how much of that water leaves the ground before it reaches them. It isn’t the water-right holders who spent two decades trying to unlock Coyote Springs Valley for development. It’s the State Engineer’s office in Carson City, applying a statute built to protect water rights that predate Nevada’s 1913 water law to a river the reservation’s own 1873 boundary has surrounded for longer than the state has had a water code at all.