KVIG Informative

Nevada’s top water regulator granted Las Vegas rights to nearly 84,000 acre-feet of rural groundwater in 2012, over the objections of tribes, ranchers and two Utah counties. A court threw out that approval within two years, and the pipeline that would have carried the water was never built. More than a decade later, the same rural coalition that fought it is pushing Nevada lawmakers to close a permitting gap that could let a new generation of industrial water users pump without the environmental review that doomed Las Vegas’s project.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority spent decades looking beyond the Colorado River for water to support Las Vegas’s growth, settling on groundwater beneath four rural valleys roughly 250 miles north of the Strip: Spring Valley, Cave Valley, Dry Lake Valley and Delamar Valley.

Nevada’s State Engineer approved most of the authority’s applications for that groundwater in Rulings 6164 through 6167, issued March 22, 2012, according to the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s own account of the decision. The rulings granted the authority rights to 83,988 acre-feet of water a year across the four valleys, subject to staged pumping and environmental monitoring conditions.

Donate

Donate

The rulings drew formal protests from the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation, the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and the Ely Shoshone Tribe, along with the Great Basin Water Network, the Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Utah counties of Millard and Juab, according to Nevada’s Division of Water Resources hearing record.

Nevada’s Seventh Judicial District Court reversed the State Engineer’s rulings in a Dec. 13, 2013, remand order, according to that hearing record and a legal analysis published by Schroeder Law Offices. The court found the agency lacked sufficient data on the valleys’ environmental effects, had no record of when Spring Valley’s groundwater would reach a new equilibrium after pumping began, and had approved a mitigation plan with no defined standards for when monitoring or mitigation would actually happen. The court also faulted the plan for leaving out Snake Valley, Utah, entirely.

Donate

Donate

The State Engineer reopened the matter and held a remand hearing on the four valleys from Sept. 25 to Oct. 6, 2017, according to the Division of Water Resources’ hearing record. In 2020, the Southern Nevada Water Authority withdrew the groundwater applications the State Engineer had not yet acted on, according to the authority’s own water resource plan, closing out nearly three decades of pursuit of a rural pipeline that was never built.

The Great Basin Water Network, the rural advocacy group that helped lead the legal fight against the pipeline, is still active in Carson City. In March 2025, the group joined 10 other organizations representing rural communities, agricultural producers, tribal governments and environmental advocates in a letter urging the Assembly Natural Resources Committee to hear Assembly Bill 109, the Water Fairness Act, according to the letter the coalition sent to committee chair Natha Anderson. The bill would close what its supporters call a loophole letting some industrial groundwater users pump without the permitting review that Nevada’s courts eventually required of Las Vegas’s pipeline.

The bill did not pass in 2025. Nevada’s Joint Interim Standing Committee on Natural Resources took it up again in its 2026 interim hearings, with testimony from the Great Basin Water Network’s Kyle Roerink and from Assemblymember Selena La Rue Hatch, who introduced the measure. The same question that took a Las Vegas pipeline from a state approval to a dead project in eight years is still unresolved in Carson City — whether Nevada checks how much groundwater a new user can take before the pumping starts, or only after.