Oct. 19, 2009

NEW DOCUMENTS SHOW BEEHIVE STATE'S POSITION CHANGED AFTER NEVADA'S THREATS.

The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that Utah Officials negotiating in secret for 4 years were threatened by Nevada that Nevada would take the matter to court or to Congress according to official memos and emails.

The Tribune also reported:" The correspondence, released under an open-records request from the Great Basin Water Network, illuminates Nevada's no-surrender insistence that Snake Valley water be split 50-50, even though Utah officials believed that impossible. The documents also appear to undermine recent assurances from Mike Styler, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, that the proposed water-sharing agreement is as good for Utah as it is for Nevada."

"It's not, critics have said repeatedly at public meetings and in comments submitted to the Utah Division of Water Rights since the August announcement of a draft deal with Nevada to plumb the west desert."

"It might be an exaggeration to say we got rolled, but we surely backtracked," said Steve Erickson of the Great Basin Water Network. "I was surprised the state backed down on all those positions and that they're advocating this agreement so adamantly when once they were opposed to them."

Many critics have denounced the agreement as a giveaway to Las Vegas at the expense of an aquifer that can maintain equilibrium only with its current water drawdown.

On Monday, Styler acknowledged that the correspondence with Allen Biaggi, director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, showed he and other Utah negotiators believed their neighboring state's demands spelled trouble for Utah.
Styler also said he agreed with many of the nearly 200 or so critical comments his department has heard since announcing a tentative agreement with Nevada to divide evenly an estimated 132,000 acre-feet of Snake Valley water a year.

"It makes me smile to see those comments," he said, "because those are the very points we've been hammering at all this time."
Nevada negotiators "were dead set they had to come up with a 50-50 [split]," Styler said. "We were saying there was no way, when we're already using more than half that."

...
"And letters from two years ago make it clear Utah didn't want to base a 50-50 agreement on the USGS estimate, which the federal agency said was only 67 percent reliable and included water used by the plants that now keep Snake Valley soil from blowing straight to the Wasatch Front."

"The harder Utah looks at that criteria, the less reasonable it looks to Utah," Styler wrote to Biaggi on July 31, 2007. "We are unaware of any reasoning that would lead us to conclude a 50/50 split is equitable or based on any scientific or legal grounds."

...

The full article is found below at the SL Tribune website:

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13596248