KVIG Informative

Congress told two states to settle a shared aquifer’s fate in 2004. More than twenty years later, nobody ever signed the agreement — and Nevada’s water regulators are still writing new orders today to control the same kind of fight in other valleys.

Snake Valley straddles the Nevada-Utah border, and the aquifer beneath it doesn’t stop at the state line. The Southern Nevada Water Authority wanted to pump groundwater from Snake Valley and several other eastern Nevada basins to Las Vegas, and that plan set off a fight over how much water the shared aquifer could lose before wells, springs and ranches on both sides of the border started drying out.

Congress tried to force a resolution. The Lincoln County Conservation, Recreation, and Development Act of 2004, a federal public-lands law, required Nevada and Utah to reach an agreement on managing the Snake Valley groundwater system, according to the text of the draft agreement the two states later produced in response to it. Nevada and Utah spent nearly four years negotiating before releasing that draft for public review in 2009, according to the Utah Division of Water Rights.

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The states held public meetings that August in Baker, Nevada; Delta and Salt Lake City, Utah; Las Vegas; and Partoun, Utah, according to the Utah Division of Water Rights. The public comment period, originally set to close Sept. 14, 2009, was extended to Sept. 30 after residents asked for more time, the agency’s records show.

The draft agreement named the officials who would sign it: Michael R. Styler, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, and Allen Biaggi, director of Nevada’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, according to the document’s signature page. Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Patricia Mulroy was named as a separate signatory on the two sections governing environmental mitigation for the valley’s native fish and frog populations.

Section 9.3 of the draft said the agreement would take effect “immediately upon execution by the States.” The copy of record has no execution date. Both signature lines are blank.

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The draft didn’t just sit unsigned — it had a built-in expiration for the water authority’s stake in the outcome. Section 8.1 held the authority’s groundwater applications in Snake Valley in abeyance only “through September 1, 2019,” according to the agreement’s text. When that date passed without a signed agreement, the legal cover for leaving those applications pending began to run out.

In May 2020, the water authority’s board voted to withdraw its remaining groundwater applications across the eastern Nevada pipeline project, including Snake Valley, Railroad Valley and Indian Springs. General Manager John Entsminger recommended the move. Clark County Commissioner Justin Jones, who sits on the authority’s board, made the motion, saying the project no longer made environmental or economic sense. The board also directed staff to return a litigated right-of-way to the Bureau of Land Management and write off roughly $330 million the authority had spent pursuing the project.

The signature lines on the Snake Valley agreement are still blank today, and nobody with the authority to fill them in is trying anymore. That didn’t end Nevada’s groundwater fights — it just moved them. In June 2025, Nevada’s Division of Water Resources issued Order 1339, freezing new groundwater appropriations in the Red Rock Valley basin in Washoe County, hundreds of miles from Snake Valley. The document meant to settle one valley’s water never got signed. The fight over the state’s next valley didn’t wait for it.