www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13602597 -
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Published on: 10/20/2009
Last Visited: 10/21/2009
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.
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On Monday, Styler acknowledged that the correspondence
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Styler also said he agreed with many of the nearly 200 or so critical comments his department has heard from 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."
A key problem was a U.S. Geological Survey study that estimated Snake Valley's aquifer could yield up to 132,000 acre-feet of water a year.
An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, enough to irrigate an acre of ground with a foot of water or supply water to one or two households.
But Styler said a sustainable drawdown would be only 105,000 to 111,000 acre-feet per year.
The proposed agreementwould divvy 108,000 acre-feet, with Utah getting 60 percent.
The remaining 26,000 acre-feet of "reserve" water, Styler said, couldn't be tapped unless both states agree, "if it's even there."
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In a Sept. 30, 2006, memo to Biaggi, Styler said the Southern Nevada Water Authority, frustrated with the pace of the negotiations, had threatened to take the matter to its congressional members, who could try to change a 2004 law requiring both states to agree on a water split.
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"The harder Utah looks at that criteria, the less reasonable it looks to Utah," Styler wrote to Biaggi on July 31, 2007.