By Vernon Robison

Moapa Valley Progress

The members of the Moapa Town Advisory Board (MTAB), in a meeting on Tuesday January 31, agreed to the idea of drafting a letter to the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) urging the entity to open its 1100 acre Warm Springs property to the public and to look at allowing limited grazing on the property.

The idea for the letter came from County Commissioner Tom Collins who, at a previous MTAB meeting, had encouraged the board to officially weigh in on the subject.

“This all came up at the meeting when SNWA was here and talking about developing trails on the property,” said MTAB member Lyn Wren.

“Well, they are going to develop the trails,” said MTAB Chairwoman Ann Schreiber. “But he wanted it open; wide open. He said he would like to go cut the fence down and let everybody on whenever.”

“I don’t remember him saying that to be honest with you,” said MTAB member Don Davis. “I think he was simply advocating for more open access to the property.”

Davis, who lives in Warm Springs, said that it made perfect sense that the public ought to be allowed to access public lands.

“People come by my place looking for the old Warm Springs resorts,” he said. “I end up telling them: Now that we all own it, none of us can use it.”

Schreiber stated that the SNWA management plans for the area had always included trails for the public to access the property.

“Well that is the point,” Davis said. “They’ve owned it for how many years? And the trails that they are talking about: the question is you have 1,100 acres there and you are going to put in 200 yards of trails?”

“But look what they’ve had to do, Don,” Schreiber responded. “How much they have had to clear and cut because of hte fires and everything else. They have been working on trails. But it hasn’t been the first thing on the list. The first thing on the list has been the fish.”

“I’m not disputing that they have been trying,” Davis said. “But I think that it is pretty low on the priority list. It is silly to have a piece of property that big that people can’t enjoy.”

On the issue of grazing, Schreiber said that she was quite certain that there would not be any grazing allowed on the property.

Wren said that the idea of grazing opened a lot of questions including how grazing rights would be allocated, whether there was enough capacity on the land for livestock and whether there was adequate water supply.

“For a property that size with all those pastures and open grass areas, (grazing) certainly should be a consideration,” Davis said. “It could be sold or leased through the same public process that grazing rights are administered on BLM land or any other public land. Certainly it should be part of the discussion.

Kim Brundy of Warm Springs said that allowing grazing would reduce the fire hazard on the land. “Sensible grazing could be beneficials for portions of the land,” she said. “It is a large piece of property and it was grazed for years and it was not the hazard then that there is now.”

Davis stated that he would be in favor of drafting a letter to encourage SNWA to open up public access as soon as possible. Other board members agreed to hear text from such a letter and discuss it at a future meeting.