'Gunslinger' sought in water fight

Minden is looking for a legal "gunslinger" to protect its vast water holdings and is ready to pay the six- to seven-figure fee town board members estimate it will cost to overturn the latest challenge from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.

"This is the big one, boys," town board member Ross Chichester said Wednesday after learning the Paiutes had filed an appeal to stop the Nevada water engineer's ruling that Douglas County's water transfers were within legal limits.

Just before Thanksgiving, the tribe appealed the state engineer's finding in Federal Court in Reno and in District Court in Churchill County.

The appeal continues to bring the Douglas County water transfer requests to a halt.

"Anything we want to do - move water, add wells, change manner of usage - all of this is tied up. It's just a matter of time before this begins to strangle us from the feet up," engineer Bruce Scott told the town board Wednesday.

Tribal lawyers argued Carson Valley's groundwater is "severely over-appropriated" and that more groundwater use means less flow in the Carson River to Lake Lahontan.

That means more diversions from the Truckee River resulting in less water to Pyramid Lake, the tribe claimed.

In late October, State Engineer Tracy Taylor rejected the tribe's move to block 19 separate applications to move or change existing water rights in Douglas County.

He ruled that the fact some Carson River water owners weren't using their full allotment, allowing the excess to flow to the Newlands Project, doesn't give the tribe and others the legal right to the water in the future.

Taylor said the tribe failed to make a legal connection between its Truckee River water rights and groundwater rights in the Carson Valley.

With 10,000 acre-feet of water rights, Minden owns the largest holdings on the Carson River.

"At present, we have been selling at $12,900 an acre-foot," said George Keele, the town's lawyer. "With roughly 10,000 acre feet, we have a fair market value of $129 million at stake here."

Keele said litigation could tie up water right transfers for 10-15 years.

"It's difficult to quantify the economic detriment," Keele said.

He and Scott expect to return to the board within 10 days with a list of possible lawyers to take over the litigation.

"We knew it was simply a matter of time before we would be selected for further litigation," said town board member Bob Hadfield. "We're not talking about chump change."

The town expects the issue to be litigated up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We need to hire the most talented counsel we can find who has no other constraints and is very, very skilled at the federal level," Chichester said. "They are going to go higher, to a place that has not always been favorable to the values of the western United States."

Board member Dave Sheets said legal counsel must come prepared.

"The primary thing is to select the best gunslinger we could find on this earth. It's not going to be cheap, but the loss is astronomical," Sheets said.

FAST FACT

The Newlands Project was created in the early 1900s by the federal government to bring water from the Carson and Truckee rivers together in Fallon where they were to irrigate 300,000 acres of desert for farmland. When the project was completed, the amount of water flowing into Pyramid Lake was cut in half and the lake began to dwindle, reaching its lowest point in 1967, a decrease of 87 feet. That's when the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe began suing to get more water. Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation