Sin City Goes Dry

Aerojet’s plan collapsed. But now Coyote Springs, its tortoises, and its groundwater are in the crosshairs of both Las Vegas’s water grab and its sprawl. Casino lobbyist and developer Harvey Whittemore, who since 2000 has contributed at least $45,000 to Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and who employs one of Reid’s sons as his personal lawyer, bought 43,000 acres of Aerojet’s property for $25 million. He then sold part of the water rights to the SNWA for $25 million. Now he’s developing Coyote Springs into a 159,000-home community with 16 golf courses. Another Reid son sits on the SNWA’s board.

Senator Reid is the chief architect of a series of land bills that have required the BLM to sell off vast tracts of public land to facilitate Sin City’s uncontrolled growth and groundwater project. In January 2006 the SNWA redesigned the project so Whittemore could tap into its pipeline for his development. A provision in one of Reid’s land bills moves a power-line right-of-way off the site.

Coyote Springs should be seen by all who believe the Mojave Desert is ugly. From the southeast corner, Audubon’s John Hiatt and I gazed out over rolling topography lit by the December sun and aglow with subtle shades of red, blue, brown, gray, and violet, every distant feature showing crisp through still, immaculate air. In places the native vegetation seemed almost lush—Joshua trees, cholla, beavertail cacti, hedgehog cacti, creosote bush, bursage, Mojave yucca, and, in the washes, catsclaw and honey mesquite. All around us jagged peaks soared into a cloudless sky: to our north the Delamar Range (much of it in federal wilderness), to our south the Arrow Canyon Range wilderness, to our east the Meadow Valley Mountains wilderness, and to our west the de facto wilderness of the Sheep Range. Whittemore’s first assaults on the earth were barely visible as dusty lesions along Route 93 and State Highway 168.

The groundwater under Coyote Springs runs down to the Moapa Valley, an Audubon IBA where Hiatt and I encountered silky flycatchers feasting on the mistletoe berries that sustain them through the Nevada winter, loggerhead shrikes waiting in ambush on snags and wires, undulating flocks of horned larks, and northern harriers dipping low over the floodplain of the aptly named Muddy River.

The Muddy is fed by “fossil water” that takes 10,000 years or more to make its way to surface springs but that diminishes quickly, as it has in the past few decades, when groundwater is diverted. The aquifer runs so deep that the springs average 88 degrees year-round.

Two of the largest thermal springs, and many smaller ones, are part of the Moapa Valley National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1979 for the benefit of the endangered Moapa dace, which exists only in this basin and only in about two miles of stream. Major habitat restoration is under way, so the refuge isn’t open to the public. But manager Amy Sprunger-Allworth and endangered-species biologist Cynthia Martinez showed us around.

When the Fish and Wildlife Service acquired the property, it had been infested with California fan palms, salt cedar, and other invasive exotics that impeded and diminished flows. But the refuge has been eradicating them, and the natives are returning. With artificial barriers and a short-lived, organic fish poison called rotenone, the refuge is also winning the war against alien tilapia, which prey on the Moapa dace. “At last count we had 1,300 dace,” said Sprunger-Allworth. “That’s pretty encouraging because there were only 900 three years ago.”

In the faster water the dace—olive-yellow and with a black spot near their tails—dashed around like trout fry, snatching food particles dislodged by the current. White River springfish, another imperiled thermal-spring species, ghosted through the clear, steaming pools. Along one stretch of stream that had been diverted through viewing windows, refuge staffers brushed algae from the glass, first gently dislodging the imperiled Moapa pebblesnails.

“We’ve got the highest-elevation aquifer spring in the valley,” remarked Martinez.

“That means we get hit by ‘the bathtub effect,’ ” Sprunger-Allworth added. “We’d see the effects [of groundwater pumping] first.”