Land 'disposal' and water
Water follows the land.
Last week, several outlets reported on a federal budget amendment with a roughly 10,000-acre transfer of public land to a water district in Southern Utah, a move that, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal put it, “reviv[ed] concerns in the Colorado River Basin about a pipeline from the country’s second-biggest reservoir,” a.k.a Lake Powell.
Environmental groups like the Great Basin Water Network were quick to flag the bill language, as were two congressional Democrats from Arizona and Nevada. “In a joint statement Wednesday from Reps. Susie Lee, D-Nev., and Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., they called on House Republicans ‘to immediately withdraw this reckless public land sale proposal which looks to be a Trojan horse to steal Nevadans’ and Arizonans’ water.’”
The land transfer is one piece of a sweeping amendment being offered by Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) and Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah) that aims to sell off hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for housing, mining and more… It’s about the land, but what happens on the land has major implications for water in the arid Southwest.
So what does this look like?
The federal government uses a somewhat sterile and strange word to describe the selling or handing off of public lands to local agencies or private hands: “disposal.”
(I’m mostly writing about this in the context of water, but if you’re interested in a brief informative history of public land, I highly recommend this in Jonathan Thompson’s Land Desk newsletter, which has some of the best regional reporting more generally).
What is important to know is that in the West, the federal government manages a huge amount of land, largely through the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It’s a massive footprint, as in 85% of the land within Nevada’s borders (the bureau alone manages 67%) and 65% of the land in Utah. Similar for other Western states.
Also important to know: The bureau is not the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service or the Fish and Wildlife Service. It manages conservation lands—to be sure—but its mission is as much economic as it is about protecting land or species.
The bureau is responsible for managing land for “multiple uses” that include mining, energy development (oil, gas, solar, geothermal, etc…), Burning Man and Bonneville Salt Flat speed racing. In some cases, Resource Management Plans for certain bureau districts identify disposal land that can be sold and privatized. Despite the bureau’s name “land management,” its actions have a major impact on water.
The rain does not follow the plow, but water does often follow land sales in the West.
These land ownership patterns, over decades, have given way to tremendous pressure to privatize land in a wholesale fashion (the Sagebrush Rebellion, the Bundy standoff, Utah’s short-lived litigation nixed by the Supreme Court). Today, there is a renewed effort to sell off land in Congress, an idea that has gained momentum across the aisle.
Public land exchanges, transfers and sales are not always de facto bad. Sometimes they are for public purposes or pursued to offset development in places the public wants preserved (for years, advocates sought a land swap to Save Red Rock in Las Vegas).
But they do often have implications for water.
Indeed, I’d argue here that water has always been central federal land policy.
Disposal, or the selling off of public land, is not new (see also John Leshy’s book “Our Common Ground” that tracks this through time). Consider the Homestead Act and its western counterpart, the Desert Land Entry Act of 1877 (remarkably still on the books).
The explicit purpose of the Desert Land Entry Act was to entice settlers to irrigate the West with cheap land — if they were able to provide water to arable acres in the West. The Carey Act of 1894 behaved in a similar (though not identical) way, in promising grants of federal land up to 1 million acres to encourage “reclamation.” In these cases, water was written into the law. But federal land sales, exchanges and transfers can be tied to water in less explicit ways (see the Lake Powell pipeline controversy above).
For instance, when federal lands are handed over to mines (as the implementation of the Mining Act of 1872 permitted for decades), there are major impacts on water long after, dictating how that (once) public land can be used into the future. Will a mine pit form? Will the groundwater aquifer be dewatered? Will spring flow be diminished?
The water question, of course, plays a rather obvious role in the expansion of cities (though the municipal sector overall is usually not the main driver of water use in the West; agriculture is). It’s still worth noting and can have a major impact on local water sources, especially in fast-growing places like St. George, Reno and Las Vegas. It says a lot about the value of water that the Southern Nevada Water Authority receives a 10% chunk from the sale of public land in Las Vegas, under a law known as SNPLMA.
Back to the budget amendment. Clark County, home to a growing Las Vegas, has been asking Congress for years to open up more federal land around its borders. But even officials there expressed opposition to the Amodei-Meloy amendment—in part citing water. Here’s what the county told InsideClimateNews: “this bill does not reflect the [Clark County Commission’s] priorities to facilitate responsible future development, especially as it relates to environmental conservation, water and public infrastructure”
The Republican-controlled Congress is weighing the budget bill and land provisions this week, called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” I don’t know how this will play out, but expect to hear a lot more about public land in the coming months. And when you do please stop to consider not only the land but the water tied to it or that flows to it.
And when you read numbers like 100,000 acres here, 100,000 acres there, one other thing to think about. The Bureau of Land Management — and other federal agencies — sometimes play a direct role in preserving, protecting or managing water in that their portfolios actually contain water rights. These are known as federal reserved water rights, and I’m left wondering how wholesale land transfers might affect them.
This is all to say, when everyone talks about land, we must consider the water too.
Clearing out my tabs:
Well-reported piece in the MIT Technology Review on data centers in Nevada:
The corporate race to amass computing resources to train and run artificial intelligence models and store information in the cloud has sparked a data center boom in the desert—just far enough away from Nevada’s communities to elude wide notice and, some fear, adequate scrutiny.
Newsom seeks to short-cut process for $20-billion Delta water tunnel (LA Times)
New this month from Nature Cities: In “Land subsidence risk to infrastructure in US metropolises,” researchers “use space geodetic measurements from 2015 to 2021 to create high-resolution maps of subsidence rates for the 28 most populous US cities. We estimate that at least 20% of the urban area is sinking in all cities, mainly due to groundwater extraction, affecting ~34 million people.”
Coverage of the report in the New York Times.
One last (not unrelated) thing…
Speaking of groundwater, I was looking at a paper last week by hydrogeologist C.V. Theis. In a 1940 paper, Theis wrote on the sources of well water, including a potential for pumping (groundwater discharge) to impact surface streams. These words stuck out to me: "All water discharged by wells is balanced by a loss of water somewhere."
That’s all for now…
Will be back with more updates soon. Until then, take care and be safe,
Daniel
Too few understand the implications, the behind the scenes in rooms with a large table and bottled water on the table, of how a few are manipulating for economic gain. How "fresh" water is a less available from the human quest to control and develop. How water will increase in value and only a few hands will determine who has first right to the water.