Transcript

Brothers/Keys: Without the public input -- it does not work

Brothers: If you are talking ground water rights in rural Nevada, I think when Las Vegas looked at filing for ground water rights through Eastern and Central Nevada, they looked in, well, in 1989, they filed a number of applications. Since then a lot has changed. We have sit down with rural counties and had discussions and have actually entered into an understanding of what is going to happen with those applications and permits and what might come of those. We need to co-operate and allow the counties to develop prior to any additional water going to Las Vegas. So I think that we saw that in '89 in response to tremendous growth, we went out and did something without stakeholder involvement, without the public input, and it does not work. And we have sit down with those counties and we are coming up with methods to address their needs as well as addressing the needs of Las Vegas which does fuel the engine of the state as far as the economy, rural counties do benefit from that also. So I think that it is something where you have to have stakeholder involvement and everyone at the table because it does not work if you go out and decide that you are the only one that has a need. Everyone has a need, and I think that we have to come to the table and I think that one of the rules of negotiation is that if we are successful, everybody gets what they need, not necessarily what they want. And I think that's seen again and again when you look at ground water rights in rural communities.

Keys: There are three reallocation types you are talking about. The first one is where an irrigation district, which we work with mostly, will go in and do a water conservation project and save some water and then we look to reallocate that to another use or to other folks on the project. And there I don't see a lot of impact on the user. The second reallocation we see is where you have urban encroachment on a project area and there the town and people are coming in and buying up the land and building houses on it. Then there is not a need for the water and you are seeing reallocations there. We encourage the reallocation to a municipal use or some other related use. The third one is just an out and out purchase, and I think Kay is talking about where we have to have the involvement of all the parties there -- first off to make it happen, and second off to be sure that the impact is taken care of one way or the other. Now, in reclamation, we don't have a lot of resources, like the PILTs stuff, payment in lieu of taxes or that sort of thing, but there are some things that we can do to work with them, in other words, looking at how the water is used, how to reallocate it, and that sort of thing

Brothers: We are working with the Muddy River Irrigation District because they do hold water rights on the Muddy River that we would like to use in the future, and I think that they see that their community is changing from agriculture to urban and we have allowed them to put in clauses to actually utilize that water till 2020 when they feel the community would have changed its face dramatically so there are things that can be done and has been done to make sure that everybody is made whole, really.

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