Celebrating 25 Years of the MVWD Posturing For The Future

By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Published July 30, 2008

This month the Moapa Valley Water District (MVWD) celebrates its 25th anniversary. This is a significant landmark in the community. However, it should be noted that the story of culinary water management in the Moapa Valley goes further back than 25 years and also stretches well before us into the future. The following is the last in a series of articles dealing with that story.

Managing Rapid Growth
By 2004, the rapid growth that had come to the Las Vegas valley had overflowed into the Moapa Valley as well. The local real estate market was booming like never before. Big developers had come to the Moapa Valley, purchased large parcels of land and were proposing huge residential developments.

In the midst of this boom, Van Robinson and the MVWD board members voiced some concern about being able to service all of the promised growth. Despite the water agreements that had been made 10 years earlier with SNWA, they still worried about being able to supply enough water over the long-term.

In the summer of 2005, the MVWD board passed an ordinance to address these concerns. This ordinance, known as the Water Rights Dedication Ordinance required developers to bring all of the water resources that would be needed to supply their projects to the table. They would then need to dedicate these resources to the district before they could get a commitment from MVWD to service their proposed developments.

Small landowners, who might not have the water to dedicate, but who wanted to subdivide their land, were offered another option. In January 2006, the board passed a Payment In Lieu of Dedication option. This option allowed the small developer to pay a fee for the use of water resources that the MVWD had held in reserve. Because the MVWD board felt unsure how much water it would actually have in reserve, there was a limit to how much water could be purchased by a single developer. This made it available to only very small projects.

New Management
Van Robinson retired from the district at the end of 2005 after 15 years of service. To replace him, the MVWD Board hired Brad Huza as the new General Manager. Huza brought 20 years of experience as an engineer to the position; with an emphasis in the area of water and wastewater management.

Building The Portfolio
Huza set about almost immediately to beef up the strength of the MVWD water portfolio. In the spring of 2006, the board approved a complex agreement for the lease of a large block of Warm Springs irrigation water from the LDS Church. The MVWD entered into the long-term lease agreement in cooperation with the SNWA. As a result of the agreement, the MVWD gained the right to use 1000 acre-feet per year of the church lease water. An acre-foot is equal to 325,851 gallons, roughly the amount needed to service one Moapa Valley family for a year. This lease opens the door to the development of a secondary water system in the community. Studies have shown that there are a relatively small number of large turf irrigation users in the community including the Clark County School District and the Parks and Rec Department. These entities currently use a large block of culinary water, approximately 500 afy, to irrigate lawns and landscape.

The MVWD is currently looking at the feasibility of building a secondary system which can feed the LDS church lease water from Bowman Reservoir to the lawn irrigation systems at the Fairgrounds and to the schools in Logandale.

“[Those entities] are paying about $800/af right now,” Huza said. “Our initial reports show that we might be able to supply irrigation water to them for $500/af. If that is so I think they would jump at that chance. And we’d free up another 400-500 afy in culinary resources.” Earlier this year Huza and the MVWD Board returned to the negotiating table with SNWA officials to update and clarify the old 1996 agreement.

In April, the SNWA came out with a new offer to shareholders of Muddy Valley Irrigation Company (MVIC). The new price, which doubled the 1996 price, offered $50,000 per preferred share of MVIC irrigation water. An offer was also made to lease shares at $1700 per preferred share per year.

In order to start buying shares, however, the SNWA had to re-negotiate its agreement with the Water District. The Authority had long since acquired much more than the 5,000 afy cap placed by the 1996 agreement. Now it planned to acquire more. So Huza and the MVWD Board returned to the negotiating table with the SNWA to update the agreement an nail down some of the hazier details.

Huza proved to be a shrewd negotiator with the SNWA. In the resulting agreement, the district agreed to lift the 5,000 afy cap and allow SNWA to transfer whatever irrigation water it could purchase to be used in urban Las Vegas. But the SNWA agreed to reserve at least 6,000 afy of priority rights to Coyote Springs groundwater for use in the Moapa Valley. They also expressed willingness to add another 3,000 afy of lower priority rights from Coyote Springs if and when the community needed it at a future date.

Like the Warm Springs water coming from directly the source, the Coyote Springs water is ready for culinary use with minimal treatment. Thus, by trading irrigation water for Coyote Springs groundwater, MVWD spared itself from having to build a water treatment plant to treat irrigation water for household use.

“With this agreement, it is doubtful if we will ever have to build a treatment plant,” Huza said. “That would have been a cost borne by everyone. So it is really a huge value for our ratepayers.”

In addition, the new agreement went into specifics about the rights for the re-use of wastewater in the community. A new community-wide sewer system currently under construction promises to yield significant quantities of effluent which may be put to secondary use. Both the MVWD and the SNWA had viewed that effluent as a possible future resource. The new agreement detailed, in precise measures, just how that effluent would be divided up between the two entities. The MVWD portion of that resource could then be used to further expand the secondary irrigation system into the lower part of the valley and, thus, free up additional culinary water resources.

Huza said that the new agreement would provide for at least the next decade of growth in the community. “The water portfolio that results from this agreement, together with the springs and groundwater that we already have, will easily provide for a community of 55,000-60,000 people,” Huza said. “It puts us in a very good position going forward.”

Huza attributes much of this good position to the early vision of Van Robinson. “There was a lot of good work done early on to get us where we are today,” Huza said. “Van viewed the water as a single resource for the valley; whether irrigation water or culinary. He set the precedent to view it as a community resource and manage it all together. The 1996 agreement did that. These new agreements are really just taking the next logical step and continuing on with the game plan.”

The MVWD Today
The MVWD currently employs 15 people with an annual payroll of $892,000. “We have come a long way from just having Jay Whipple as our one full-time employee and him having a little bit of part-time help to the staffing we have now,” said MVWD Board Member, James Robison.He pointed out that the district now offers a full lineup of health and retirement benefits to its employees. “We are at a point now where people actually want to make a career at the district,” Robison said.

The MVWD services roughly 3,000 household customers. It maintains about 177 miles of pipeline that carry and deliver over 1 billion gallons of water to Moapa Valley residents every year. With an expanding customer base and staff, the district built a new office building in Overton. The first board meeting was held in the new building in March of 2002.

A View Of The Future
Talking about the future of the MVWD, Huza emphasizes that the district is taking a long-term approach. “Our goal is to preserve enough of the community’s water for development purposes as needed,” Huza said.

With the recent agreements, Huza believes that the district has secured water resources that will supply the community’s needs for the foreseeable future.

This allows the MVWD to look at things a little differently. The district’s Water Rights Dedication Ordinance, for example, will be approached from a different position. “We will keep it in place because it is essentially a good ordinance,” Huza said. “But we are now allowed to manage it differently.” Rather than limiting service to small landowners with small projects, the option allowing Payment In Lieu Of Water Rights can be opened up to offering much larger blocks of water to bigger developers, Huza said.

While the current community’s immediate water needs seem to be met, all bets are off when the 30,000 acres of BLM disposal land is factored in. Servicing all of that land is a much bigger nut to track. “That may very well be the trigger that starts us talking to the SNWA about becoming a member of the authority,” said Huza.

With water being such a limited resource in the region, Huza believes that the district would have to be able to tap into water supplies in Northern Nevada to meet such a huge need. And that may be a bigger project than the local entity could manage on its own. “It would certainly make sense at that point to have everyone in the region working together in coordination for a solution,” Huza said.

Finally what about the concern, voiced by many, that the conversion of Muddy River irrigation water to culinary uses will dry up the community’s agricultural ‘green belt’? Huza responds to this by saying that the days of the ‘green belt’ as it has been defined are limited. “The fact is that the era of 15-20 acre alfalfa fields dotting the community is coming to an end,” Huza said. “It is just an economic inevitability. With land priced at $100,000 an acre and irrigation water selling at $50,000 per share it seems clear that agricultural use is on the way out.”

MVWD Board member, Glen Hardy agrees. Hardy is one of a handful of people that still practices agriculture in the community. “I’ll probably be the last one to hold out and hang on to my water shares for irrigation,” Hardy said. “But you are fooling yourself about it being agricultural water anymore. That’s all there is to it. It is just too valuable to raise alfalfa on.”