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The Chosen One - Las Vegas Sun Page 2 of 10 After that, they will invite you to penetrate the bulging casebook of resolved water feuds known as "the law of the river." "It's not a perfect system," they will say, "but it works." "It's not a perfect system, but it's better than no system." These men even have a nickname: "The water buffaloes." But when Pat Mulroy took over as general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District in 1989, she was not a man, not from Reclamation, not even particularly experienced in water. Nobody accused her of being a buffalo. Her reaction to the Colorado Compact and its water delivery system, which sends the least water to the city closest to the river's largest reservoir, earned her a different nickname entirely. " Scarlett." For those unfamiliar with "Gone With the Wind," Scarlett is the ruthless, scheming, tough, histrionic and beautiful one who thrusts the turnips in the air and cries, "As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again!" Mulroy's vow: Las Vegas would never be thirsty again. When Clark County Manager Richard Bunker first interviewed Pat Mulroy for a general administrative job in 1978, she was 25, exotic, blond and smart. A German -born daughter of an American father and a German mother, she was working at UNLV trying to finance a master's degree in German literature at Stanford University. She hoped to eventually parlay this into a job with the State Department, but she also recalls that she was "in desperate need of a job." Diplomacy's loss was Bunker's gain. As she sharpened her pencils and found her parking spot at the Clark County manager's office in 1978, she realized this was no ordinary administrative job. Bunker was furiously fighting off annexation of the Strip by the city of Las Vegas. The city itself was still so overtly a mob town that, as Mulroy recalls it, "you'd look up and Tony Spilotro would be standing over your desk. It was wild." Mulroy was so capable that Bunker quickly promoted her to lobbyist for Clark County, working the halls of the Nevada Legislature in Carson City. She drafted and then politically finessed legislation creating the public administrator's office. (If you die intestate in Clark County, your heirs will find out what this office does.) This was most definitely not wild, but it taught her how to turn ideas into laws. Not two full years after starting work with Bunker, it was over. Returning from a German holiday in January 1979, she learned from the passenger next to her that her mentor had just been appointed to the Gaming Control Board. "I landed and went, `Gee, I wonder if I still have a job ? "' She did, a number of them, but Bunker hadn't spotted the job that would define her yet. By 1985, after a series of turnstile administrative positions, she landed as deputy general manager in charge of administration at the Las Vegas Valley Water District. Four years later, the district was looking for a new general manager. As weighty as the deputy title sounds, it was in no way an obvious steppingstone to the general manager's job. Administrators administrate. Water managers fight to keep their regions in water. But Bunker saw steel and rare competence in Pat Mulroy, according to Mulroy, qualities that she didn't even see in herself. He pushed her to apply for the top job. Now, the logical candidate in terms of experience was not only a water buffalo but head buffalo, former Reclamation Commissioner Bob Broadbent. Bunker, however, had a water pedigree to top that. He came from three generations of Southern Nevada http: / /www.lasvegassun.com /news /2008 /jun/08 /chosen -one/ 6/17/2008