Interview Transcript

John Tracy

Q: But, if you transfer that water use from agricultural use to urban use . . . use it in a hotel or a home?

A: What happens to a lot of it is that the transfer transfers not only the water right but the place of use. You know that example of taking an acre out of ag and putting it in homes with more homes per acre and you end up with more water. Typically, the developers know this, and so they don't do an acre of homes, they do an acre and a half of homes. And so they are trying to use up the whole consumptive portion of the water right that they were legally entitled to. They can build six homes and then the six homes end up using 3 acre-foot of water as the one acre-foot farm used, so it's the same amount of water. When they transfer water rights, the State Engineer deals with all of this, he's got to deal with the amount of water diverted. That's the amount extracted from groundwater diverted from the stream and then no junior water rights holders can be negatively impacted. So the people lower in line than you, even though you may have a more senior right, that if you were moving your water right from an efficiency of say, 66%, to one that was much high efficiency because of your type of use, you will be negatively impacting the junior water right holders. In that sense, the amount of water not used from the original diversion that went back to the stream. For example, if your new use didn't allow that much water to go into the stream then people with the junior water rights will be negatively impacted and the State Engineer, if they are looking at the water right transfers, have to take that into account. You will receive less water rights for that purchase, yeah. So the rule is that if you transfer a type of use, you are not allowed to negatively impact junior water right holders and so when you purchase a water right, you are not really given all of that water right if you are transferring it. Now, if you went and bought somebody's farm and the water right that went with it and you are still using it to irrigate crops, then everything stays the same. But if you wanted to purchase a water right and move it off that piece of land and build a hundred homes on it or something like that, then there is a formula the State Engineer ends up having to do. And it's not just a formula; it's an analysis they have to go through and it's not something trivial or a one-day thing, it takes many more days than that and it's a long involved process.

Q: But if you just take in general a look at the fact that the water in the West -- it is a limited amount, yet we continue to build in the desert, we continue to build homes in the West?

A: Well, water in the West is interesting because even if you are looking at it right now in terms of percentages that are used. In terms of the Truckee River water, I mean if you look at the flow of the Truckee River, and say ok, that's where we are getting the lion's share of our water from, although we are getting some from out of the groundwater in the South Hills area and Spanish Springs. But if you look at that and ask what percent of the water we are diverting out of the river is being used for the various components -- industrial, municipal, housing, and agriculture -- the Truckee Meadows is right now about 50% ag, so the amount of water being diverted from the Truckee is almost predominantly ag. If you go to the Carson and Walker, it's up there in the 80% and above range and the Humboldt is the same way. So if you start thinking are we water limited, yeah, we don't have enough water to grow crops on all the land around here. But we always knew that, and so what's happening as we develop, well ag land comes out of production and it goes into development. Now Vegas is unique because Vegas didn't have that situation and they were never ag, so when you are looking at their water consumption, that's a lot different. They are having to find it from other places, but if you look at it not from just what is the State of Nevada's Colorado River allotment but let's look at the Colorado River watershed, you talk about a situation where there is in the lower Colorado area, Arizona and California, there is 8 million acre-feet diverted a year or 7 million acre-feet or something like that. Most of that in California is used for agriculture, so if you look at it on a watershed scale, and realize that where are you going to get the water from, where are you going to buy it from California for the agricultural interest? Now the problem Vegas has is they are going to start competing with San Diego and they are going to start competing with Los Angeles for those water rights purchases because L.A. already uses some Colorado River water for their municipal purposes and I am not sure of San Diego's status on that but they are going to be competing with other municipalities for the water. But if it was just simply ag, you go out and pay tens times as much for what the agriculture return on that water is, and who wouldn't sell it at that point?

Q: Well we're going to be getting to "that" eventually with the politics of water because even if Las Vegas -- if it becomes a political fight just between municipalities of San Diego and Los Angeles . . . it just becomes a bidding war and water becomes gold.

A: Yeah. Right now, with the amount of allocations in the Colorado and what's diverted, most of that predominantly goes to agriculture. If you add up the big municipalities, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tucson, they still wouldn't demand all the water that has been allocated in the lower Colorado. Now the water that has been allocated in the lower Colorado, that's another one if you really like deserts. You find out that they sort of over-allocated the river, so it's not like that's all really there. But the big competition there will probably end up being more of an international issue of competing interest for restoring the Colorado River delta that flows on down to Mexico. There is going to be a significant amount of water required to, I don't know if you can ever recreate it, but improve the environmental condition down there versus the municipalities' use. There is still going to be competing interest for agricultural irrigation because they developed the Imperial Valley and all these other agricultural areas that have relied on it, but right now, the population demands could not use all the Colorado River water.

Q: But the population demands will eventually use all of the Colorado River water as the population grows. And like you said,over-allocating all over the West, aren't they doing that with the ground water and the surface water? It's like a numbers game but we don't know exactly how much water is there?

A: Colorado is a little unique because that's one of the few river systems that that's the way they allocated it. I would say that was truly an over-allocation. When you look at other watersheds, say in Nevada -- the Walker and Carson and Truckee -- I had a friend at Kansas State University that always referred to a surface water right as hunting license, that in essence you were just next in line and there is a point where you just don't even issue any more hunting licenses. But if you look at the Walker River basin, in one year, I forget which year it was during the extended drought, the flow was like 100,000 acre-feet in the Walker River while in 1983, it was 800,000 acre-feet so you have this huge variability. Well, if you are one of the most junior water rights, say you are one of the last ones in line, there is going to be about 400,000 acre-feet of flow or more to get your water right, whereas if you are the most senior, it could be one of the low flow years and you would get it. So when you talk about over-allocation in a river system, that one is relatively easier to manage because you just sort of have, this is the first in line, this is the second, and when you run out of water that year, you run out of water and the rest of the people don't get it. In a bigger flow year, you go all the way down to the bottom and everybody gets it. The more difficult situation is when you look at environmental concerns in the river and then you are looking at trying to maintain environmental benefits of the river. Then you have to play that off against the water rights and then over-allocation becomes real because maybe you could allocate 200,000 acre-foot a year and maybe there will be no significant environmental degradation. That would be great, but if you've allocated over 400,000 acre-feet a year and the environmental degradation occurs because in those big flow years -- where you can actually meet 400,000 acre-feet -- those last 200,000 acre-feet are causing the environmental problem, that's when you can get yourself in kind of a river over-allocated system -- in essence you are mining the water from the environmental benefit. It's not real obvious because there is still water flowing in the river and [the damage] takes much longer to show up. It's not like if you have a farm and you are not diverting water that year, you don't grow something. That is really obvious and immediate. Many of the environmental concerns come about over not having adequate water for decades, so it's almost too late by the time you recognize that you have over-allocated the system.

Q: But how do you balance the environmental needs, the demands of the continued development and the fact that we don't know exactly how much water is down there in the water table?

A: I don't know how they're going to resolve that one out here. I mean number one on the ground water rights, there are fair levels of uncertainty of what the natural recharge of the groundwater is. So they're allocated groundwater rights based on what their estimated natural recharge is. There is a formula that the State of Nevada uses, and Utah has theirs, Idaho has theirs. And it's difficult for a variety of reasons and one is, is that you are unsure how much recharge you are getting in the groundwater system and you are actually unsure how much water is being taken out. You can grant a water right, say you grant 10,000 acre-foot of water rights. Typically, very few people ever use all the water rights they've been granted. I mean there are situations where they may be granted 10,000 acre-feet of water rights but it may be in conjunction with their surface water rights and they may want to use their surface water right first so they never use their ground water rights.

Q: You make it sound as if there is more water to be used that we aren't quite using it all. But it seems to me like we are going to use every drop, and then what are we going to do?

A: That's what makes it difficult because imagine the situation where someone does have that water right and they are not using it all on a year-to-year basis. Then there is reporting and you are supposed to report to the State Engineer how much water you are really using. But sometimes, it's an estimate because you may not have the wells metered. A lot of the times you're sort of estimating your water use over power consumption -- there is relationship between how much power is used and how much water comes out of the well. Well, if things happen, like your well gets clogged up, you have a power usage and you may be overestimating the amount of water you are using. Sometimes [the well] may loosen up and you may be underestimating the amount of water you are using. Until you put meters in the well, you really don't know and a lot of the wells in the state aren't metered. They just don't have a flow meter that says, this is how much is coming out. The pump goes on, water comes out, you irrigate, and then everybody is happy. And so that's what it really comes down to -- if you have a good groundwater monitoring network, you can monitor what the change in the water table is and so if you see the water table going down and down and down, you know you have a problem.

Q: It seems to me that something is going to have to change, something is going to have to give in a way that we allocate the water in order to use the water. What do you see that we will have to do to be able to make the water last to continue to development?

A: The only way to do it, outside of efforts for cloud seeding to increase the snow pack and everything which has some limited impact on the overall water balance in the system, the only thing to do obviously is use less water. If you look at it right now, for example these statistics are from 1995 and from the Nevada Division of Water Planning when they put it together -- if you look at the per capita water usage in Clark County for example, it's 330 gallons per person per day. The consumptive use was about 240, somewhere around there. What do you really need to sustain a person? Well industry is difficult to say because some industries are very water consumptive and others aren't, but if you just went into the household and you realize that you drink at most a gallon of water per day, most people don't even drink that much, and then you are going to need some for your shower, some for washing, and some for things like that, then you add it up, your in-household use, and I've seen studies like this about how low you can get it without really inconveniencing yourself, it's 50 or 60 gallons per day. Now where does the rest come from? Well, certain inefficiencies like how many times you flush your toilet, how big your washing machine is when you put a load in, or when you are really using your dishwasher most efficiently and things like that, but [you see] the lion's share comes from landscaping and lawns. I do know that for example in town Newford Development has a house that is fascinating because he has a cistern to collect rainwater and he really doesn't use much off of the water distribution system. It's really an interesting thing he has set up to show how low you can go. He has got his lots native-landscaped where you are trying to go with the native vegetation or something that looks like an organized native vegetation because those survive off of what water is naturally available here. He does some water collection in his cistern which he uses for other elements in his house and there is some element of re-use there but that's one alternative. He doesn't have a green lawn, so that's something people don't like. I like having a lawn for the kids out in the backyard too, but there are things that are limiting the amount of lawn you have in your house so that you don't have a quarter acre with a house and the rest of it being lawn. That is something that will probably end up going. If you go out to Tucson and have look around, they have naturally moved to that. There are very few houses there I saw that have the big grassed area and in the areas that did have it, they were moving to kind of a dual water system where they had what is called gray water used to irrigate landscape not just the golf course but the house so that there was sort of a two water lines in the house. This isn't everywhere down there; it's just some experimental areas where they've had the highly treated water to your house for washing the clothes and washing the dishes, drinking and all that, but then waste water is collected and treated, and then there is the gray water system which is sort of the treated waste water which is used for irrigation and watering the lawns and everything and there's been a fair amount of research done in Tucson on that.

Q: Do you think we are going to have to look at alternative water sources such as the experiments being conducted in Tucson?

A: Truckee Meadows is already there, not in the households, but if you look at the South Truckee Meadows, they use treated effluence. Go down to Double Diamond and see the purple pipes and you see signs that say don't touch this water, this is treated waste water which is secondary treated which is good treated waste water and that's used for irrigation, the golf courses use it. And as far as I have understood and this was last year but I heard someone talking about this saying that they have in essence sold all the waste water that they have, so all the water that is used in our houses that gets collected and treated, well that's already sold because it's cheaper for a golf-course to irrigate with than it is to get their own water to irrigate.

Q: What do you see -- them having to eventually put more moratoriums up? We are just going to have to just stop building? They don't think we are going to run out of water -- they say TMWA and these studies show that there is more water there.

A: It's interesting because I look at it not just in terms of the United States and our culture here. But if you look at it around the world and realize that there is a huge population in all sorts of arid regions around the world and nobody's ever stopped growing and the bottom line is they've always figured out something to do and whether it be increased efficiencies or just going in and finding more water from some other place, for example, piping it in or other ways of doing it. I mean look at Saudi Arabia, they are desalinating sea water. The energy associated with that is tremendously expensive but it's interesting because St. Petersburg, Florida, which is what I consider a fairly wet region, they're desalinating some of their bay water and using it for deliveries. It used to be the standard thought that if the energy cost for treating an acre-foot of sea water was $2000 an acre-foot, which is really expensive -- I mean I don't care where you are using this water, that's expensive. Well, St. Petersburg is using the waste heat from some generating plant and as far as I understood, they got it down to $500 dollars an acre-foot. All of a sudden you are starting to get down to the realm of the energy cost being feasible and the efficiencies being there of using something like sea water. If you get to that point, then the question becomes where is your limitation? Is it really going to be in your power to do it? Because there is an awful lot of sea water out there that can be used along the more arid coastal regions to be able to meet their water supply. Now, imagine the situation where LA and San Diego have feasible desalination facilities. How hard will it be for Vegas to sort of buy into those to get higher allocations from Colorado River water and so forth and so on? So there are always ways to reorganize the system to get it done. However, there are always going to be environmental consequences, and I think that's where the real trade-off is going to be. It's going to be what are you going to accept [in terms of] degradation to your environment to allow this increased growth? That's always an interesting question because if you go back a hundred years ago, we had senators looking at Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake and saying that's the biggest waste of water they could ever imagine, just don't let a drop go there because it just evaporates. So what is our mind set right now? Our mind set right now is we want to preserve these lakes. That is not just a couple of people in the federal government saying this is a good thing, that's the general population of Washoe County -- they have bought into environmental improvements in the Truckee River and Pyramid Lake.

Q: Do you think Washoe citizens have bought into environment concerns at the expense of development?

A: I don't think that they've really sat down and looked at the trade-offs. I don't think they've really looked at it all that hard, but I think that the people that live here know that development is going to occur and it's not an either-or situation. It's sort of like how much environmental degradation is permissible so that we're still in a place we consider nice in an environmental sense?

Q: And you don't see the limits?

A: I see the limits in Truckee and the limits are coming up. But actually, I see the limits being related to water quality in terms of what we put back into the river and how that impacts downstream and the lake. Also the land -- the valley is filling up and you can go to Spanish Springs and look at how quickly that's filled up. There is this point where you just don't build up on the hillsides for a couple of reasons. One is it's difficult and expensive. The other is that when you go onto the hillsides, a lot of that is federal lands that you really can't develop too easily, so in this region, it's kind of interesting that I don't know there've been any kind of real studies done. If you look at the limitations of land to develop versus the limitations of water -- they may be kind of co-limited. They may be right at the same point because when you start looking at where else you are going to build houses in Reno -- you could build up but that one has been considered. I remember the Washoe County Regional plan came out and I know that was roundly criticized as recommending building up. But building out is kind of hitting the limits here [too]. South Truckee Meadows is developed, Spanish Springs is developing, the North Valleys are developing and there isn't a lot more space to develop here. Maybe water is always going to be there, but you can always go to higher and higher efficiencies and then there is this point where you hit 2 or 3 million people and you can't do any more. I just have the feeling that there are other things that are going to limit it before then in this particular region. Now in Vegas, that's a different story. Vegas has a lot more room to just keep spreading out and out and out, but it is another one where it's probably going to end up being a bidding war in 20 or 30 years from now. Seeing who will pay what for an acre-foot of water rights is going to be kind of interesting. But at that rate, it sort of like the issue of power to get you more water than if you are spending $500 an acre-foot to deliver water and that is what it costs to desalinate water, well, then all of a sudden desalination becomes a feasible option for delivering water. So it is never really an absolute. It's more [a matter] of how expensive is this going to be, what are the environmental consequences, is the population going to put up with it? That's where the limits will come in.

Q: And in Vegas they're going to have the money . . . and they are politically strong and can fight for it.

A: What's interesting is looking at arid regions across the world because this isn't just a US phenomena. Look at Israel's population growth, they keep growing, where are they getting their water? They're going to higher and higher efficiencies. They still have a thriving agricultural industry over there, and they just keep moving to higher and higher agricultural value crops. Countries like Jordan and Morocco are heading there too, and Egypt. And so in many arid regions of the world, the growth keeps happening and they keep looking for more and more efficiencies in water use and more and more economic benefits to its use.

Q: So, we are going to have to look to the Middle East for answers?

A: Yeah, and actually this is part of the International Arid Lands Consortium; that's why I know about this stuff. It's interesting to see what they've been doing. They have a very different social structure and social problems which enter into how you view water development, but some of the things they've moved to have been quite fascinating. I mean Israel's agriculture is now predominantly greenhouse, which is incredibly high efficiency. You take an acre-foot of water and you use it 3 or 4 times and it transpires and you collect it and it transpires and you collect it and you keep going and eventually you have to move it on in the system but then it's treated and then used for something else. So if you look at how many times an acre-foot of water is used there, it's phenomenal. It's used and it's reused and it's reused and it's reused, and that's something that potentially we will eventually have to go to here. And not just, it goes into our house, it goes to the treatment plant, it gets infiltrated on golf courses, and that's it. It may have to have a few more steps in there. And there are people thinking about this but again, it's an issue of technological development and the price you are going to have to pay for it and the environmental consequences and what all those trade-offs are going to be. It's a real interesting problem.