Pat Mulroy: Liquid asset

Wherever there's water, Pat Mulroy finds it--for better or worse

By Andrew Kiraly

When Pat Mulroy arrived in Toledo, Ohio, in 1995 for a water conference, the billboard that greeted her wasn't exactly a greeting: Representations of Texas, Arizona, California, New Mexico and Nevada loomed over the Great Lakes, sucking the life out of the five freshwater bodies with big, greedy straws.

"And the line on the bottom was 'Never, never, never,' or something to that effect," Mulroy recalls. "They really believed that if the desert Southwest got desperate enough, we would run pipes across the Continental Divide, up the Great Lakes and bring water back across the United States to the Southwest. It was hilarious. 'Have you people penciled this out? Do you have any idea what the [environmental impact statement] on this would look like?' I mean, talk about horrendous."

While Southern Nevada hasn't poked any straws into the Great Lakes, our sprawling region has become awfully thirsty--thirsty enough that some might consider the above anecdote something more of a portent than a parable. And through 2004, Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy has worked to slake that thirst, as Southern Nevada coughed through a fifth year of drought. As Lake Mead languished at 55 percent of its capacity. As growth continued unchecked despite a 17-member task force formed to study the issue. As polls revealed residents beginning to question our urban sprawl.

In this key year--the year the Las Vegas Valley finally looked in the mirror and accepted itself as a growing city in a forbidding desert--Mulroy has played a central role. Whether you call her a water guru, water thief, growth addict or desert diplomat, Mulroy's often controversial part in Southern Nevada's new understanding of itself earns her a share of the title of Mercury Newsmaker of the Year.

She drove home to Nevadans the importance of water conservation--a tough sell in a city of miracles where everyone is from somewhere else. She pushed innovative ideas such as buying water from farmers in California and Arizona (an idea pretty much shot down by Interior Secretary Gale Norton). She renewed efforts to reduce our dependence on the Colorado River--from which we get 90 percent of our water--with a veritable flood of schemes, including a controversial move to tap rural groundwater, a proposal that inches daily toward reality. She helped broker a water banking deal with Southern California's water agency and--her latest coup--a shortage-sharing agreement with Arizona authorities that will net us 1.25 million acre-feet of water for $330 million, enough for four years. And she's helped Nevada elbow its way to a better place at the table where six other dry states fuss over a Colorado River Compact that many say is woefully outdated.

"I think the Water Authority has put Nevada, together with the [Colorado River Compact], back into the seven-state mix as a player," she says. "We were always ignored, but we're now the biggest problem the other states have. It's challenged a lot of the status quo and forced people to take notice."

It seems wherever there's water, Mulroy finds it--not with a dowsing rod but a hard-nosed mandate that accepts Southern Nevada's explosive spread as something like manifest destiny. Which is exactly the problem, critics say. Observing that she essentially holds the most powerful office in the state--administering the resource that allows our metropolis to thrive--they say Mulroy is a myopic enabler of the valley's rampant growth, shirking a responsible, big-picture view because she's cowed by the development industry.

"She does her job in providing water, and [in her view], the growth issue is for other parts of the community to decide," says longtime local environmentalist Jeff van Ee. "I don't think she needs to be quite so detached [from the question of growth]. People like myself have suggested that sale of public lands be tied to the availability of water, and I think this community needs to think more about getting the water first and then bringing in the development rather than vice versa--letting development come in and then deciding where to get the water."

Hugh Jackson, a policy analyst for the watchdog group Public Citizen, echoes van Ee's concerns, saying Mulroy is a member of the "grow or die" alarmists. "I genuinely think she wants to do the right thing, but the political and economic pressures on her to find as much water as she can are always going to be more powerful than the pressures to protect the resource--just based on the historical track record of who wins in Southern Nevada. The policies she's pursuing are facilitating the sprawl that continues to fuel our need for water."

Mulroy bristles at the characterization of her as a tool of the growth machine. Instead, she says, her job is more like gentling along a healthy--but delicate--economy. "The economy would go through some real stops and starts if you [slowed or stopped growth]. Once you've stopped an economy, starting it again takes forever. And then most communities never really succeed in kick-starting again because the confidence is gone."

Besides, she says--invoking it like a mantra--the problem isn't growth. It's grass. "I very much understand why people say, 'Why allow growth to continue?' The responsibility lies in educating people that the impact of growth on the water supply is a function of landscaping, period. If you had built 10 houses that had no landscaping around them, you would have virtually no impact on the water supply."

She says it's the drought, not growth, that has Southern Nevada reaching north into rural Clark, White Pine and Lincoln counties to bolster its water supply. In November, Congress passed a bill that paves the way for a pipeline to send rural groundwater to Southern Nevada as early as 2014--at an estimated price of $1 billion. But while balking at the notion of another "Owens Valley"--that infamous, early 20th century episode in which Los Angeles politicians and investors sucked Owens Valley farmers dry--even Mulroy admits they're not even sure how much water is there, nor what the environmental consequences might be.

Which only spurs criticism from rural residents. Jo Ann Garrett is an activist and resident of Baker in White Pine County, from which the Water Authority wants to draw up to 129,000 acre-feet of groundwater a year. Though Mulroy insists a network of environmental regulations would enforce responsible drilling, Garrett is leery.

"Las Vegas is not the only place in the West having to deal with water problems," says Garrett, who has led recall efforts against White Pine officials who want to bargain with the Water Authority. "In Arizona, they're doing some imaginative thinking about issuing building permits and requiring in some cases the developers to provide the water, or charging fees that are related to the difficulty of the water project. In other words, discouraging rather than encouraging endless development."

It is a desert after all, right? "Okay. It is," Mulroy says. "But people are moving to the desert. Every time there's a blizzard in Buffalo, people move to Phoenix, they move to Las Vegas, they move to Southern California."

Or maybe it's not a desert in any meaningful way--in the sense that, at least in Mulroy's view, we'll never run out of water. Or will we? She doesn't flinch.

"I don't think so. I really don't. Because there's always the ocean. And we're just waiting since it's the most expensive resource. You figure we pay the Bureau of Reclamation 50 cents an acre-foot for our raw supply. Desalted ocean water is $900 an acre-foot at the cheap end. We're hoping technology gets to the point where it's less power-intensive. That's the big driver in cost. But that's where it's going to have to go."