KVIG Informative

The federal government authorized Nevada’s first pipeline from Lake Mead in 1965, when forecasters expected it to cover Las Vegas’s water needs through 1990. Population growth blew past that forecast within a decade, and today Nevada’s entire Colorado River supply still moves through the system built in response, even as Washington orders the state to give some of that water back.

By 1944, Las Vegas and the surrounding valley were running out of groundwater, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s own history of the project that eventually brought Colorado River water to the area. Robert B. Griffith, a civil engineer who moved to Las Vegas with his father in 1905 and graduated from the University of Nevada in 1923, began working to secure a new water supply for Southern Nevada during World War II, according to a University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives finding aid for his papers. Griffith joined the Colorado River Commission of Nevada in 1957 and chaired it in 1966, the same finding aid states.

Sens. Alan Bible and Howard Cannon of Nevada introduced the bill that became the Southern Nevada Water Project on Jan. 6, 1965, according to the record of a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation hearing held that May 20. The bill, S. 32, authorized the secretary of the interior to build intake facilities, pumping plants, and an aqueduct and laterals to move Colorado River water from Lake Mead to Clark County, according to the law’s own text. The same hearing record put the project’s first-stage cost at $49,024,000 and its ultimate cost at $81,003,000, with benefit-cost ratios of 1.5 and 1.6.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law as Public Law 89-292 on Oct. 22, 1965, according to the U.S. Statutes at Large. The law authorized $81,003,000 at September 1965 prices, repayable over 50 years with interest, and specified that the delivered water remained subject to the Colorado River Compact, the Boulder Canyon Project Act and a treaty with Mexico, the same text states.

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The United States and the Colorado River Commission of Nevada signed a construction and repayment contract on Aug. 25, 1967, and Congress approved the project’s first construction funding that November, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s project history. Crews began work on the River Mountain Tunnel’s outlet portal on March 26, 1968, and the Alfred Merritt Smith Water Treatment Plant was finished in 1970, the same history states. The Las Vegas Valley Water District received its first deliveries from the system on June 16, 1971, and the project’s first stage, capable of delivering up to 132,200 acre-feet of Lake Mead water annually, became fully operational that Nov. 1.

Federal forecasters expected that first stage to cover Southern Nevada’s water needs until 1990, according to the same Reclamation history. Instead, the Las Vegas area’s population grew 115% between 1960 and 1970, and the project’s capacity was used up by the early 1980s, the same source states. Construction on a second stage began in June 1977, delivered its first water on March 19, 1982, and was finished in 1983, adding another 166,800 acre-feet of annual capacity and bringing the system’s combined delivery capacity to 299,000 acre-feet a year, nearly all of the 300,000-acre-foot entitlement Nevada holds to the Colorado River.

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The city renamed the project for Griffith in 1982, according to the same UNLV finding aid. The Southern Nevada Water Authority took over the Griffith project’s facilities after seven local water and wastewater agencies merged into that authority in 1991, according to the agency’s own water resource plan.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s most recent operating study keeps Lake Mead in a Level 1 Shortage Condition through 2026, with Nevada ordered to give up 21,000 acre-feet of water, 7% of the same 300,000-acre-foot entitlement the Griffith project was built to deliver in full, according to the agency’s August 2025 release. The pipeline Griffith spent two decades fighting for still carries nearly all the water Nevada is legally owed from the Colorado River. Six decades after Johnson signed that bill, the only thing that’s changed is how much of that water is actually there to send.