OPINION: Nevada is right to sue over its newly curbed Colorado River allocation

Nevada did something recently that the rest of the Colorado River Basin should have seen coming: It sued the federal government. Along with the Colorado River Commission of Nevada and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the state challenged the Department of the Interior's new record of decision governing operations at lakes Mead and Powell. 

Save The Colorado, our program dedicated to protecting this river, publicly supports that lawsuit, and we're considering filing an amicus brief in the case. Here's why.

Under the plan, Nevada could lose more than 70 percent of its already tiny Colorado River allocation — a state that only gets 300,000 acre-feet a year to begin with, the smallest slice of any basin state. Meanwhile, the four Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — face no mandatory cuts at all, only voluntary conservation goals that history shows rarely amount to much.

That imbalance would be easier to stomach if Nevada were a water hog, but it isn't. 

Not only do Nevada and Las Vegas in particular use less Colorado River water than any other state in the basin, Southern Nevada has built the most aggressive water conservation programs anywhere in the seven-state system. Las Vegas pays residents to tear out grass. It has banned new ornamental turf outright. It recycles nearly all the water used indoors, returning it to Lake Mead through return-flow credits. Nevada has spent two decades doing exactly what every drought-stricken Western community should do: use less, waste less, recycle more.

Compare that to the Front Range of Colorado where I live and where our organization is based. There is not one well-funded, ongoing "cash for grass" turf removal program in the entire Denver metro area. And specifically, Las Vegas offers significantly larger financial incentives and stricter legal mandates for turf removal than Denver Water by far.

Municipal utilities here have never faced a mandatory reduction in what they're allowed to divert from the river. Quite the opposite, in fact: Denver Water just finished building a large new dam project to divert even more water from the river, a disastrous project that we fought to stop for over 15 years. Further, believe it or not, the Upper Basin states are proposing more than 30 new dam and diversion projects that would drain dramatically more water out of the river before it reaches Nevada. 

Our Save The Colorado program exists to protect the ecological health of the Colorado River. We believe the Upper Basin — including Colorado's Front Range cities and West Slope farms — should be cutting their water use significantly because the river itself needs more water left in it, not less. Every acre-foot that stays in between the river's banks, rather than getting diverted into another suburban lawn or field of alfalfa, is an acre-foot that can support fish, riparian habitat and the river's own basic function as a living system.

Instead, the bureau's record of decision does the opposite of what the river needs. By protecting Lake Powell's elevation and prioritizing water storage over releases through Glen Canyon Dam, the plan will hold back water rather than let it flow downstream. 

No stretch of the river will suffer more from the bureau's decision than the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon riverine ecosystem is already starved by the impacts of Glen Canyon Dam, and the bureau's decision would further decimate the Grand Canyon's native fish, beaches and riparian landscape. 

Nevada's lawsuit is, at its core, an argument about fairness: Cuts should track actual water use and actual effort, not just where a state happens to sit on a map relative to a dam. 

Further yet, the goal shouldn't only be to redistribute the pain more fairly among human water users. It should be to leave more water in the river itself. If the Upper Basin matched even a fraction of Southern Nevada's water use and conservation ambition, the river would be healthier and the Grand Canyon more verdant.

Gary Wockner directs Save The Colorado, a program of Save The World's Rivers.