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Policy Debates over the Southern Nevada Water Authority Groundwater Development Project: Beneficial Uses of Water in a Desert

The western United States continues to be the fastest-growing and fastest-urbanizing region of the country, while also being the most arid (Mackun and Wilson, 2011). As population and cities continue to grow in water-scarce environments, people are forced to confront value tradeoffs in trying to balance efficiency, equity, and effectiveness of water allocation practices (Ingram, Scaff, and Silko, 1986; National Research Council, 1992; Howe and Ingram, 2002; Ingram, Whiteley, and Perry, 2008). In the U.S. West, these water allocation challenges are made even more difficult as people try to increase the flexibility of an established water system deeply entrenched in American political and institutional history (Ingram, 1990; Wilkinson, 1992; Reisner, 1993; Ingram and Brown, 1998; Lach, Rayner, and Ingram 2005; Lach, Ingram, and Rayner, 2006). In this article, we examine the water conflict between the Las Vegas metropolitan area and rural communities in east-central Nevada (figure 1). The main source of Las Vegas’s current water supply is the Colorado River, which flows south from Lake Powell at the Arizona-Utah border through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. Nearly 40 million people in seven states, including major U.S. cities and agricultural systems, depend on Colorado River water. Over-allocation of the Colorado River, multiple competing needs, prolonged drought, rapid regional population