KVIG Informative

Las Vegas chose in 1947 to walk away from the valley’s own groundwater and tie its future permanently to the Colorado River. That single choice, made before Clark County had even formed the agency to carry it out, still decides where every drop of water in the Las Vegas Valley comes from today.

Nevada’s Legislature passed Chapter 167, Statutes of Nevada 1947, approved March 27, 1947, creating the Las Vegas Valley Water District and authorizing it to procure, store, distribute and sell water and water rights from Lake Mead for industrial, irrigation, municipal and domestic use, according to the Nevada Legislature’s own published text of the special act.

Clark County voters approved forming the district in a special election on Oct. 19, 1948, and elected its first seven-member board of directors, according to the Las Vegas Valley Water District’s own official history. The legislation followed years of concern that the valley’s groundwater, the source for the city since its 1905 founding, could not keep pace with its growth, the district’s history states.

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The district did not control the valley’s water system right away. The Las Vegas Land and Water Company, a subsidiary the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad had formed in 1905 to supply the original townsite, had passed to the Union Pacific Railroad when Union Pacific acquired that railroad in 1921, according to a UNLV Libraries Special Collections finding aid on the company’s records. Union Pacific agreed to sell the Las Vegas Land and Water Company to the water district for $2.5 million in 1952, transferring its springs, wells, pumping and storage facilities and water-bearing lands, according to the water district’s own official history.

The Las Vegas Valley Water District began operating independently on July 1, 1954, drilled its first well that same month, and took its first delivery of Lake Mead water in 1955, building its first reservoir at Charleston Heights the same year, according to the district’s official history.

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The district is now one of seven member agencies in the Southern Nevada Water Authority, formed in 1991, which together serve more than 2 million residents across the region, according to the water authority’s own published mission and history.

The 1947 decision to anchor Las Vegas’s future to Lake Mead instead of the valley’s own groundwater has outlasted the private railroad subsidiary it replaced, the independent utility that first carried it out, and the regional authority built on top of it since. Every drop that reaches a tap in the Las Vegas Valley today still traces back to the arrangement Clark County voters approved on a single day in October 1948.