Transcript

Jeff Fereday/Kay Brothers: How does the city of Las Vegas acquire water rights for long term water planning?

Fereday: Kay, how does the city of Las Vegas acquire water rights for a long term planning horizon, for more than 10 or even 20 or 30 years? Do you have a mechanism in the Las Vegas valley for acquiring water rights to hold now for use later?

Brothers: The city of Las Vegas doesn't acquire water rights; the Southern Nevada Water Authority does. It is the regional agency that has been given the responsibility to go out and acquire future water resources. And I mentioned our water resource plan: we've been looking at acquiring future options or resources since the mid 1980's. So we have purchased many river irrigation company rights, we have gone through the State Engineer's process and have virgin river rights, we've looked at utilizing our instate resources very heavily. We also have been working on the Colorado River and issues with the Bureau of Reclamation with the other six states since the late 1980's, trying to develop the interstate banking regulations for the lower basin and trying to utilize the Colorado River because there are certain high years, certain years where Arizona might not use all their apportionment and can store water. So we've been working on flexibility and future options since the 1980's for all the jurisdictions in Las Vegas.

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