KVIG Informative

For ninety-one years, the agency Nevada created to guard its stake in the Colorado River has done exactly that job, through a compact, a dam, a pipeline and now a federal lawsuit. The fight it filed this past August picks up an argument its predecessors started before Hoover Dam existed.

Nevada Gov. Emmett D. Boyle appointed an informal commission in 1920 to represent the state’s interests in Colorado River water and power negotiations, according to the Colorado River Commission of Nevada’s own published history. The Nevada Legislature formally named that body the Colorado River Development Commission the following year.

The Development Commission operated from 1921 to 1935 and helped draft two of the river’s foundational documents: the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which divided the river’s water among seven states, and the Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928, which authorized construction of Hoover Dam and set Nevada’s own share of the river at 300,000 acre-feet a year, the smallest allocation of any state on the river, according to the commission’s history.

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The Legislature replaced the Development Commission with the Colorado River Commission of Nevada in 1935, under Assembly Substitute for Assembly Bill No. 220, Chapter 71 of the Statutes of Nevada, according to Nevada Legislature records. The new commission had five members: four appointed by the governor, plus the governor as chair, with no more than three from the same political party.

Lawmakers revised the commission’s membership twice in the 1960s. Assembly Bill 508 in 1963 added the director of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources to the board in the governor’s place, and Assembly Bill 272 in 1967 removed that director’s seat and had the governor appoint a replacement member instead, according to the same legislative records.

The commission’s basic task never changed: securing and protecting Nevada’s rights to Colorado River water and the hydroelectric power the river generates. The agency’s board today has seven members, four appointed by the governor and three chosen by the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and it still negotiates the interstate agreements that determine how much water reaches Las Vegas taps.

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That mission brought the commission into federal court this past August. The Colorado River Commission of Nevada joined the State of Nevada and the Southern Nevada Water Authority in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, challenging the Aug. 21, 2026, Record of Decision that set operating rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell through 2036, according to the governor’s office.

The lawsuit contends the federal plan could cut Nevada’s 300,000-acre-foot allocation, the same figure set by the 1928 law the commission’s predecessors helped write, by more than two-thirds, while the Upper Basin states face no mandatory reductions. Gov. Joe Lombardo and Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager John Entsminger have said the state would rather negotiate a seven-state agreement than litigate, but Nevada filed first rather than wait for one to arrive.

The commission Nevada built in 1935 to keep a seat at the table over a river it couldn’t control has spent nine decades doing exactly that, through a compact, a dam, a pipeline and now a lawsuit. The agreement it’s fighting over this year won’t be the last one it has to defend.