Last week was a pretty good one for Douglas County. The Nevada Water Engineer finally brought some sanity to the challenges by the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe against water rights transfers within Carson Valley.
We can understand the Tribe's frustration. Because the Truckee and Carson rivers are connected by a canal upstream from Pyramid Lake as part of the Newlands Project, the Paiutes view any diversion of water upstream from them in both basins with suspicion.
The Newlands Project was created in the early 1900s to bring water from both rivers together in Fallon where they were expected to turn 300,000 acres of desert into farmland. When the project was completed, the amount of water flowing into Pyramid Lake was cut in half and the lake began to dwindle until it reached its lowest point in 1967, a decrease of 87 feet, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
That's when the Paiutes started suing to get more water for the lake.
They've been successful in the past, but the efforts to stop transfers of groundwater within the Carson Valley were clearly examples of overreaching.
Most of the changes in diversions within the Valley were of water rights that were already appropriated. In other words, someone already owned the water rights and they were just transferring where they were being used.
The arguments on this were complicated, but Engineer Tracy Taylor came down firmly on the side of long-standing state policy that Carson Valley's ground and surface water are not connected.
While we've been told many times by the U.S. Geological Survey that isn't necessarily the case, we're more than happy to take the win.
