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High Country News -- Printable -- February 21, 1994: Las Vegas wheels and deals for Co... Page 2 of6 I. David Donnelly, chief engineer for the water authority, is also openly disdainful of the importation project that he defended until recently. "Frankly, it doesn't make any sens . We don't want to build any more darns, reservoirs, or construction projects. We want to do things that cost less and that are more politically, socially and environmentally accepta Ie." With the groundwater project - a traditional approach to a city's need for water - out 0 the way for the moment, Mulroy and her colleagues now see Las Vegas as a major player n the Colorado River. Last year, she took her message to Washington, D.C., as the first chai an ofthe Western Urban Water Coalition, a new lobbying group for cities seeking a great r share of water in the West. Western water attracts visionaries. Some pursue mirages; others prove to be ahead of t eir time. And there are a few who figure out how to get what they want from the changes hey see commg. Patricia Mulroy may be one ofthe practical visionaries of the post-reclamation era. Sh appears to understand where reform of Western water is headed: away from new construction projects and toward better management of rivers and ecosystems. She wa ched Denver's Two Forks Dam proposal go down to defeat. Closer to home, she saw South rn California fail to get its peripheral canal. From those lessons, she has corne up with an alternative to a massive construction and dewatering project. Mulroy says that if Nevada can add 200,000 to 250,000 acre-feet of Colorado River w ter to the state's current annual allocation of 300,000 acre-feet from the Colorado River, the she will recommend dropping the agency's claims on rural Nevada water. Those claims ar for about 200,000 acre-feet. Mulroy says the water needed to supply the next century of growth in southern Nevad is not a major amount, given the allocations to other states on the Colorado River. But to get there, she acknowledges, will require "major rethinking" up and down the river. The 1922 Colorado River Compact - a major strand in the web of interstate compacts, legislation, regulations, court decisions and rules collectively known as the "law of th _ allots 7.5 million acre-feet of water annually to the upper-basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, and 7.5 million to the lower basin states of Nevada Arizona and California. Of that, California gets 4.4 million acre-feet, Arizona gets 2.8 million acre-feet, and Nevada gets 300,000 acre-feet. Most of California's and Arizon 's Colorado River water goes to agriculture, as does the upper-basin's water. Those allocations made sense when the 1922 compact was signed, and when the West was seen as a potential agricultural powerhouse if it only had water. But today irrigated agriculture is on the defensive. In California, for example, Rep. George Miller helped put together a coalition of urb interests and environmentalists that pushed a major water reform bill through the Con in 1992, despite intense opposition from California agricultural interests. That reform make it easier for cities to buy up agricultural water. Southern Nevada, an overwhelmingly urban area, has essentially no irrigated agricul http://www.hcn.org/servletslhcn.PrintableArticle?article _id= 118 9/1212006