What Las Vegas and St. George are doing to Color Country defines what evil is.

The Salt Lake Tribune today carries a paid ad from Terry Marasco, a resident of Baker, Nevada who is desperately fighting to keep his home from becoming another Owens Valley alkali desert. His letter, addressed to the people of Utah, shows how Nevada’s water grab makes no sense for Utah.

Marasco is a reasonable and temperate person and his logical ideas presented in the letter make perfect sense. You should look for it and read it.

I, on the other hand, like to say things in more plain language: It’s a dirty deal being hammered out by people whose hearts have been rotted out by the corrosion of money.

Nevada wants to suck the Great Basin dry so real estate developers in Nevada can keep on building cookie cutter houses out into the desert. Utah wants to suck Lake Powell dry so real estate developers can keep on building cookie cutter houses out into the desert. Either could stop the other. But they have almost cut a deal now where they’re both going to let the other do their worst. Developers are willing to pay big bucks to make sure our ‘representatives’ win their next election.

And their worst may just end up bankrupting both states. Because the facts are that there just isn’t enough water. Both pipelines will cost billions of dollars to build – each. Las Vegas is used to spending that kind of money but the much smaller community in Southern Utah just doesn’t have it. The worst of all possible worlds, which is likely to happen, is that this partnership of evil will succeed and both states will borrow against their future to build them. But there just won’t be water to fill the pipelines and both states will end up paying for ugly, empty steel snaking through the deserts.

You think that never would happen? In the 1980’s, completely misjudging the weather, Utah built giant pumping stations, – big enough to pump 1.5 million gallons per minute – miles of canals, 25 miles of dikes, an access road, and a gas pipeline to drain the Great Salt Lake because it was raining too much. Just about the time they were finished, it stopped raining. The pumps were used for a few months and then shut down – but Utah paid for them anyway. Utah has enough money to survive this kind of misjudgement. The southwest corner of Utah doesn’t have that much money.

All so real estate developers can keep on building cookie cutter houses out into the desert.

The real cost, however, will be that it will ruin – totally devastate – one of the last wildlife sanctuaries in the West. How do you think birds survive their migration north and south each year in the West? The answer is that they stop there. When “there” isn’t there anymore … goodbye birds.

All so real estate developers can keep on building cookie cutter houses out into the desert.

But what do I know? I wouldn’t blame you in the least for brushing me off because I certainly don’t bother to say things in a nice way. You can’t brush off facts. Here are the facts:

• For Want of Water

  A five part series published by the Las Vegas Sun that covers the history and lays bare the double dealing of the Nevada water grab.

• Gambling on the Water Table

  The High-Stakes Implications of the Las Vegas Pipeline for Plants, Animals, Places and People.