Remembering a Nevada water advocate
Plus: More federal fallout.
Nevada and the Great Basin lost Simeon Herskovits, one of its most passionate and dedicated public interest water attorneys, last week. Through his calm but assertive rhetorical style, Herskovits played a pivotal role in ensuring water officials weighed the impacts of their policymaking on the public interest and the environment.
Over the past two decades, Herskovits was a constant presence in Nevada courtrooms, advising rural counties and advocating on behalf of the Great Basin Water Network in challenging the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s bid to ship rural groundwater to Las Vegas. He was persistent in his legal challenges, a true thorn in the side of the water authority as the network cleverly contested the project through every avenue.
Born in 1963, Herskovits attended Columbia University for his undergraduate degree and his J.D. University of California Hastings Law School (UC Law San Francisco). He fought, even when others thought the battles he was fighting were un-winnable.
In 2022, I attended a gathering of the Great Basin Water Network in Baker, Nev. right outside Great Basin National Park. Baker became the hometown of opposition to the pipeline project, and the gathering was meant to mark the water authority’s decision to shelve its pipeline project—following a loss in state district court.
The word “network” is the operative word for the Great Basin Water Network, because its membership brings together a diverse coalition of local governments, Indigenous communities, ranchers, and environmentalists—people who do not agree on a lot of things. But they were clearly united in admiration for Herskovits, and his unyielding belief in the judiciary as a check for the public interest in our governance system.
I remember, in particular, one comment from one of the speakers, who was recounting the conventional wisdom back in 1989 (when the water authority first floated the plan to pipe groundwater) that the Las Vegas powers that be would eventually get their 250-mile water pipeline. Her attitude was “every one day we extend the fight is a victory,” but she did not think the water network would win. Then Herskovits showed up.
“But one night I was at the Border [Inn], and there was a new guy here: Simeon,” she said. “I didn’t know him. I knew who he was. I knew he was a lawyer. And he had a couple glasses of wine. And he got a little tipsy. And I’m behind the counter listening to this guy. And at some point, my brain went ‘My God, this man thinks he can beat him.’” It took more than a decade, and many lawsuits, but the coalition did prevail.
When Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the water network, shared the news with me of Simeon’s passing at 61 a few days ago, I was saddened by it, but also filled with gratitude in having interviewed him many times. Simeon was generous with his time, and I learned much from talking with him, as I have from so many water attorneys.
In recent years, I interviewed him less about the pipeline, and more about another case. Herksovits played a critical role in a legal effort to bring more water to Walker Lake, a desert terminal lake in Mineral County near the Nevada-California border.
Over the past century, upstream agricultural diversions from the Walker River, in both Nevada and California, severed inflows to the lake, causing significant environmental harm and leading to the loss of fishing and recreation for local communities.
Herskovits, through the federal courts, pressed a claim that the loss of Walker Lake violated the public trust doctrine, a common law principle that sovereign states are responsible for maintaining access to water bodies and preserving natural resources from degradation as stewards of the environments—the public’s trustees.
The case mirrored, to a degree, a landmark water case from 1983, when the California Supreme Court found in National Audubon Society v. Superior Court that the public trust doctrine applied to water rights in the case of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s diversions from Mono Lake, another Great Basin desert terminal lake.
Simeon, working with Mineral County and the Walker Lake Working Group, pushed for Nevada to consider how public trust principles weighed on water allocations in the nation’s driest state. The issue ultimately came before the Nevada Supreme Court—and it caused a stir. Industry groups and water districts submitted amici “friend of the court” briefs warning the court against adopting the National Audubon standard.
Simeon was undeterred.
The issues Simeon was working on struck at the heart of debates around how water should be used in a West that still depends on 19th Century “first come, first served” law. A West still beholden to the Lord of Yesterday, as Charles Wilkinson called it. He asked questions about what the public’s role should be in allocating a public resource.
In a water system in which change is so often driven by conflict and challenges—to dispute a water right you have to file something literally called a “protest”—successful public interest groups often need advocates like Simeon. Persistent, dedicated, and focused. Someone who can harmonize voluminous facts and science with statutes.
In a 5-4 decision, the Nevada Supreme Court recognized that the public trust doctrine applied to water rights but stopped short of adopting the National Audubon standard, which would have allowed state regulators to reconsider past water right allocations.
But even in what initially looked like a setback for “public trust” restoration efforts at Walker Lake, Herskovits found the path forward. “At the end of the day, the majority opinion amounts to a relatively narrow holding,” he told me. As always, he had a plan.
More from the Great Basin Water Network on Herskovits’ work:
After graduating from law school, Simeon took the corporate route on Wall Street, until he couldn’t take it anymore. Then, he started fighting pipelines, settling in Taos, New Mexico, where he began his public interest work with the Western Environmental Law Center, focusing on issues relating to the Spanish-land-grant acequia systems. One of his first major battles was against the Cadiz pipeline in the Mojave Desert, a water project that remains unapproved to this day. Shortly after, he found his way to GBWN. In his polite and courteous manner, Simeon asked the board if he could join the fight against the Las Vegas pipeline. And here we are today. Eastern Nevada and Utah’s West Desert remain intact
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Simeon’s focus was always the public interest. He was a careful reader of regulations, statutes, and precedents. He was a creative mind that could transform syntax and lexicon into a means of protecting what we hold dear.
The federal fallout continues:
There are major questions about federal funding as the Trump administration paused conservation funding on the Colorado River—funding seen as critical for making cuts to manage demand against a shrinking supply, KUNC’s Alex Hager reports.
Meanwhile, KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny reports that the federal government canceled a meeting on the management of Glen Canyon Dam.
From the L.A. Times: “As the Trump administration continues its campaign to slash the federal workforce, more than 700 year-round National Park Service employees have taken buyouts, according to an internal email sent to supervisors late last week.”
This week, the Army Corps of Engineers grilled about why water was released from California reservoirs without coordination with local water managers and with little justification, SJV Water’s Lisa McEwan reports.
Supervisors in Lake County in northern California, citing the Trump administration’s executive order on California water, voted unanimously this week to submit letters to the governor and the federal government voicing concerns about an agreement to take down dams on the Eel River, the Lake County News reports.
I'd like to better understand the economics of these dam closures. Is it the fish ladder requirement, or the fact that solar and other sources of energy are getting cheaper? Or are the dams simply not fixable?