Thursday, March 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Pole position

Nevada Power's next big power line is causing waves of angst

By Heidi Walters

Nevada Power Co. took a hike last week. No, not out of the power business in Southern Nevada. And, no, not a hike in power rates. They--or, rather, two Nevada Power environmental scientists--took a real hike with a man named Nick Saines who's mad about the company's plan to build a new electrical transmission line through Rainbow Gardens.

The area, in what the Bureau of Land Management calls the Sunrise Mountain Instant Study Area, is a gorgeous, spire-punctuated vastness of rocks of every color and geologic persuasion on the east side of the Las Vegas Valley. To the north is the prominent Frenchman Mountain and smaller Sunrise Mountain, where you can see the Great Unconformity, a buried erosion surface in the layercake of rocks that represents 1.2 million years of missing earth history. The only other place the Great Unconformity is visible is at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Further to the northeast lies Gypsum Cave, which contains some of the earliest evidence of humans in the United States.

Saines, a Sierra Club hike leader, is concerned about a particular area south of the Great Unconformity where he and another hiker, Gary Beckman, have been mapping potential new hiking trails with the BLM.

"The BLM wants to develop Rainbow Gardens to take pressure off [the overcrowded] Red Rock [Canyon]," Saines says. "There's some really beautiful places in the Rainbow Gardens area. And the most beautiful is the Valley of the Pillars."

Saines and the BLM had recently chosen a site for a new trailhead where the Valley of the Pillars trail and another trail converge. But then he caught wind of the new power line project. "I found out they were going to put in 185-foot towers through there," he says. "So those trails are no good. The power lines would visually impact them."

On the hike, Saines followed the well-traveled Valley of the Pillars path, which passes through open desert and then rolls up through the colorful hills. At some vantage points, rows of mountain ranges can be seen receding into the hazy distance. Then a spur winds around the base of a towering spire called Red Needle. In the foreground is black-streaked Lava Butte and, closest in, a lovely valley through which the new power line would travel. But, lo, if you squint your eyes you can also see two sets of gray-lattice power lines already there--the 1970s-built Navajo-McCullough line that takes power from the Navajo Generating Station in northern Arizona to a station north of Boulder City, and the mid-1980s-built Intermountain Power Project line that carries power from north-central Utah to the Los Angeles basin.

Yes, Saines is aware of the power lines already traipsing through his beautiful valley. But he says a new line could be the last straw. The taller poles, from certain vantage points, might compete with the spectacular natural spires.

"This new line will be closer to the Red Needle, and might even be at the base," Saines says. "We're not against the power line project per se, but we want them to re-route the line, or put part of it underground, or put up shorter towers."

The power line proposal, actually, isn't a new one. It's part of the massive Centennial Plan to bring power from several new power plants to Southern Nevada customers. The project, says the company, will increase reliability and capacity. In one part of the plan, three 500-kilovolt transmission lines will carry power from the Harry Allen plant at Apex, north of Las Vegas, to three substations. Two of these lines are completed. The third, headed for the Mead substation south of Boulder City, is the one slated to pass through Rainbow Gardens. It would be in a new, 500-foot-wide corridor about 200 feet west of the existing lines. The new corridor right of way through the wilderness study area was granted in a provision of the Clark County Conservation of Public Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002.

That, says local environmentalist Jeff van Ee, is a problem in itself--a public process problem. He says the map for this new line through Rainbow Gardens wasn't available to the public until after the land bill was passed. And, he says, at no time has there been a chance to discuss the bigger picture.

"At the beginning of the Clark County lands bill, when all these energy projects were [also] cropping up, I asked Sen. Reid if we could take a look at the whole energy system in Southern Nevada," van Ee says. "We need a comprehensive, regional look at where to place these plants and where to route the transmission lines. And we're not doing that--we're doing it project by project."

Nevada Power counters that the public's been plenty involved. And the company's environmental folks, who hiked along amicably with Saines, scouting for tortoise and owl burrows and taking in his concerns, seem a bit exasperated by all the angst.

"Nick keeps assuming what those poles are going to look like and where they're going to go," says Eileen Wyncoop, a Nevada Power environmental scientist. "I've tried to ask Nick to be patient--we really don't know what visual impacts will be there yet." The BLM is the lead agency on the power line environmental assessment, and public scoping meetings could begin as soon as early April.

And it's not as if the Centennial Plan was sprung on people overnight, she says.

Larry Luna, Nevada Power's project manager for the new Apex-Mead line, says in 2001 and 2002 Nevada Power held "over a dozen community open houses on the Centennial Plan and three more this year on the Harry Allen-to-Mead" line alone. And the public will have more chances to comment.

But Luna is doubtful the line will go underground: It would be very expensive, require more roads (including paved ones), and would be a maintenance nightmare--every time there's a problem, the land would have to be dug up.

"It would have a significant environmental impact," Luna says. "There'd be more surface disturbances."

Jane Feldman, conservation chairwoman for the local Sierra Club chapter, says the club hasn't taken a stance yet on the power line. She, personally, supports Saines' efforts to tone down the visual impacts, but not his push to have the lines placed underground. That, she says, could disturb sensitive species such as bearpaw poppies, desert tortoises and burrowing owls.

Luna says Nevada Power will do what it can to minimize visual impacts of the aboveground line and towers, perhaps by locating them strategically in the topography. He agrees the power line towers "are not going to enhance the viewshed." That's just a fact. But they have to be taller than the old lines, he says, to accommodate two lines, one for now and one for the future.

Saines and his group, meanwhile, will keep applying pressure. "Yes, there are towers already in there," he says to criticism that the place is already degraded. "And that was a big mistake at the time. But we're not talking about Nick Saines' and Gary Beckmans' favorite hikes. We're talking about the people, about future generations going out there. They'll have these big ugly towers sticking up...in the most beautiful part of Rainbow Gardens."