Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  Two obstacles had to be surmounted: obtaining the rights to pump water out of the Spring Valley aquifer and obtaining a federal permit for a pipeline right-of-way across federal lands some 270 miles to Las Vegas. Even if the water authority were able to buy all the water rights, it would be unable to pipe it to Las Vegas without a right-of-way to cross federal lands. Although Nevada is a small-government, no-tax, individual-responsibility state, the federal government owns 80 percent of Nevada’s roughly 70 million acres. The reason was that the state government did not want responsibility for lands that were not water supplied. The state government wanted areas adjacent to rivers and springs and left management of its vast desert and mountain ranges to the Bureau of Land Management. Then in 1998 Senator Harry Reid introduced a bill that would transfer 25,000 acres around Las Vegas from the federal government back to the state. The state would sell these lands and use the proceeds from the sales to go to the Nevada Education Fund (5 percent) and to the Southern Nevada Water Authority (10 percent), with the balance to the federal government. Then in 2002, 2004, and 2006 he introduced similar bills, adding more acreage for sale, but this time the lands were farther north in Lincoln and White Pine Counties. The proceeds went to the same two state agencies as well as wilderness preservation and federal parks, but the lands were now part of state territory.

  Lincoln and White Pine Counties are in the heart of rural Nevada, where snowmelt from a circle of mountain ranges in the vicinity of Mount Wheeler, Nevada’s second-highest mountain, is stored in an underground aquifer. The groundwater level in these mountain valleys is so high that it supports a system of springs, streams, and aboveground lakes. This section of the Great Basin is also known for its rich birdlife and pine forest ecology.

  What could be more natural than that a desert city such as Las Vegas might want access to this vast water supply, untouched except by a few ranchers and alfalfa farmers in Snake Valley on the east side of Mount Wheeler and Spring Valley on the west? Snake Valley, however, is on the border with Utah and has one large landowner who has rights to forty thousand acre-feet of water. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, under the direction of Pat Mulroy, began applying for water rights to ninety thousand acre-feet of water in Spring Valley and fifty thousand acre-feet in Snake Valley. At that point the ranchers and farmers of the area cried “Owens Valley!” They claimed that Wheeler’s snowmelt sustains pressure in the water table for hundreds of miles around. Pulling that amount of water out of the ground, they said, would suck the springs and streams dry, kill the vegetation, and turn the valley floor to dust. Then began a long series of hearings.

  An Advisory Committee was charged with working out the mix of Las Vegas’s water needs with those of the ranchers of White Pine and Lincoln Counties. But the scales seemed to tip in favor of Las Vegas. One local member of the Advisory Committee, Gary Perea, reported, “The thing I kept hearing was that MGM Mirage employs more people than live in White Pine County.”

  The locals requested a detailed water study that was never done. White Pine rancher Dean Baker, who had rights to forty thousand acre-feet of water in Snake Valley, decided he didn’t want to share it with Las Vegas casinos. (Forty thousand acre-feet is roughly a seventh of Las Vegas’s entire allocation from the Colorado River.) Meanwhile, Pat Mulroy’s Southern Nevada Water Authority started buying up ranches in the adjacent Spring Valley, spending $22 million for one ranch and eventually $78 million for a dozen more. Once one ranch sold, other ranchers in the valley began to sell, figuring that once the city started pumping water out and the water table fell, their land would be worthless. After buying the ranches, the Las Vegas Water Authority was in the business of alfalfa farming in Spring Valley. Dean Baker, the rancher in Snake Valley, decided to hold out.

  Up until this point the struggle was between southern Nevada and northern Nevada. Then Utah entered the picture when Utah senators introduced similar land bills and wanted to be able to use the proceeds for construction of a new pipeline from the Colorado River to St. George. (Utah does not use its full allocation of Colorado River water.) St. George, a Mormon town just over the Nevada border, is called the Mormon Dixie because of its mild climate. The town was the winter home for Brigham Young, and the Mormons grew cotton there during the Civil War. (It also has a classic Mormon church designed by Miles Romney.) These negotiations were taking place in 2006 before Nevada’s great real estate collapse that began in 2008. Utah, however, had something Las Vegas did not—a debate about the true costs of development and a slow-growth movement. Nonetheless, the state wanted a pipeline.

  Harry Reid’s position as majority leader in the Senate helped delete the Utah land provisions from the bill, and the White Pine County Land Bill passed as a rider on the Tax Relief and Health Care Bill of 2006. It should be noted that Reid’s old mentor, Mike O’Callaghan, was against pulling water from rural Nevada to supply Las Vegas. As editor of the Las Vegas Sun, he sided with the ranchers of White Pine County and wrote, “[This] isn’t a new idea. . . . Big bucks and the drought have dragged it out of hiding again.”

  The ongoing hearings related to the pipeline project produced mind-numbing testimony about greasewood plants, water mining (illegal in Nevada), dust storms, water-table levels, Ice Age aquifers, “phreatophytes,” Great Basin cold desert, cheatgrass, grazing rights, recreation land, shallow pumps, “wet valleys,” rabbitbrush, and much more impenetrable language on water models. However, in testifying before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Pat Mulroy gave one very clear statement of assurance: “An Owens Valley cannot and will not occur in Nevada.”

  The one remaining obstacle was for the city to obtain a federal right-of-way to build the pipeline to transport the water. The Bureau of Land Management owned hundreds of square miles that lay between the northern valleys and Las Vegas, so the pipeline would have to cross 250 miles of federally owned land. For the next six years the political efforts to stop the northern Nevada pipeline focused on stopping the federal permit for a right-of-way. As Lake Mead dropped farther in each passing year, the more likely it was that the Bureau of Land Management would approve the pipeline.

  Two days after Christmas, on December 27, 2012, the Bureau of Land Management authorized a right-of-way for the Southern Nevada Water Authority to build the 263-mile pipeline that would run from Lincoln and White Pine Counties to Las Vegas. It allows for an 84-inch pipeline (7 feet in diameter), 272 miles of power lines, plus several pumping stations, electricity infrastructure, and a buried water-storage reservoir—all granted “in perpetuity.” Nevada’s state engineer granted the Southern Nevada Water Authority the right to pump up to 84,000 acre-feet of groundwater from the rural valleys. The US Fish and Wildlife Service issued an earlier finding that the project would not “significantly” affect a dozen threatened or endangered species. Estimates of the pipeline cost range from $3 to $15 billion. The board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority has not yet voted to proceed because the cost estimates and the funding for the project have not yet been determined.

  When Bechtel built the Central Arizona Project, it was originally budgeted at $1.8 billion and ended up at $8.5 billion. When Bechtel built the Central Artery Project in Boston, it was originally estimated at $2.75 billion and ending up at $16 billion.* When they built the Black Mesa pipeline that has been pumping 4,300 acre-feet of water out of Black Mesa for forty-three years, it was subsidized with a $3 billion federal research and development grant.

  Although Pat Mulroy assured a Senate committee there would be no Owens Valley syndrome in Nevada, this is a guarantee she cannot make. The future is out of her control. The city will grow, and there will be a new head of the water authority. Like Los Angeles and the Owens Valley, Las Vegas will need more and more water. Like Los Angeles, growth is a goal in Las Vegas. In September 2013 the Bureau of Reclamation announced that it would reduce its release of water to Lake Mead by 750,000 acre-feet. This meant that Lake Mead could drop another 25 feet by the fall of 2014, putting the
water level in the danger zone below the Las Vegas intake pipe and triggering automatic reductions in water withdrawals. Pat Mulroy immediately went to Washington, met with Harry Reid, and made headlines when she said the drought on the Colorado River was a natural disaster no different from Hurricane Sandy and that Las Vegas was as deserving as New Jersey and should be declared a disaster area and eligible for federal aid. She later backpedaled, but some believed that this was the opening argument for federal dollars to help build the Northern Nevada Water Pipeline Project.

  The pipeline from northern Nevada promises to be the most expensive public works project in Nevada history. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal pointed out, “Pat Mulroy was in Washington this week meeting with U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in search of federal money for the cause.”

  One of the many unasked questions about true costs in an age of climate change is this: Why should the water that supports the Cirque du Soleil’s famous aquatic production, O, be drawn from an Ice Age aquifer in northern Nevada and in the process destroy a landscape and ecology that took thousands of years to create?

  *The Bellagio hotel-casino is now owned by the small oil-rich Middle Eastern country of Qatar. The Qatar Holding Company, a subsidiary of Qatar Investment Authority, bought the Bellagio for $4 billion in April 2013.

  *The Heye Foundation in New York did most of the excavation and saved many artifacts. George Heye established the Museum of the American Indian at 155th and Broadway in New York and financed the expeditions to the Anasazi sites near Overton. Its collections are now part of the Smithsonian.

  *The current chart of Lake Mead water levels shows that number for the month of October 2010.

  *The state of Massachusetts continues to find it difficult to fund infrastructure projects, upgrade its transportation systems, or fund new transportation projects because of the debt service on the cost of the Central Artery Project.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BECHTEL FAMILY BUSINESS

  Just before the Bally’s video sign on the Strip, at the corner of Flamingo Road and Las Vegas Boulevard, a chain-link fence encloses an electricity switching station the size of a city block. Tall, stately electrical transmission towers emerge from the switching station. The towers cluster like masts of sailing ships before they march across the Strip, their fat cables drooping with electricity. Then they separate and fan out to the giant casinos—south to Bellagio and City Center (not a city, not a center), north to Wynn Resorts and the Venetian. One column, however, crosses the Strip and heads due west along Flamingo Road past the Playboy resort and continues for a dozen miles to what used to be the end of the city and the edge of the desert, but is now another switching station sending electricity to an endless sea of gated housing developments, none of which have solar panels on their roofs.

  When a visitor points out the transmission towers to a friend who has lived in Las Vegas for thirty years, she says, “Funny. I never noticed them before.” The electrical towers are visible only in the daytime. At night, with the lights at full megawattage, a visitor is wrapped in a nimbus of light. The Bally’s corner marks the point of maximum illumination in the Las Vegas desert night sky, so bright that the electrical glow identifies the city to astronauts some 285 miles in space. At night, a driver approaching Las Vegas from 40 miles away on Route 15 sees the surreal glow rise out of the darkness like something from a science fiction movie.

  The dazzling lights of the Strip distract a visitor from any awareness of anything but the pulsing immediacy of the twenty-four-hour party spread out around him: gambling, girls, fun, music, clubs, restaurants. Billboard trucks drive up and down the Strip, advertising euphemistic “escort” services: “Hot Babes—College Girls, Asian Girls—in 20 minutes.” Prostitution isn’t legal but isn’t illegal either. Men on the street pass out pornographic business cards to anyone with a hand to take one, including children. Taxi drivers recommend casinos and nightclubs according to their passengers’ budgets: Wynn Resorts for the wealthy, Circus Circus for the thrifty, Treasure Island for office workers on a spree. The name casino resorts are owned by a handful of players—Steve Wynn (Wynn Resorts), Sheldon Adelson (the Venetian), Kirk Kirkorian (MGM Grand)—and are all traded on the New York Stock Exchange. No more worrying about the Teamsters Pension Fund to get money for expansion.

  The promise of Las Vegas is rarely realized, even for the rich and famous. Tiger Woods, who is known to have celebrated a golf tournament win with a $75,000 Methuselah-size bottle of Cristal champagne at the nightclub XS (pronounced “Excess”), found his VIP “escorts” in Las Vegas; Michael Jackson, his final doctor. Growing up in Las Vegas has its downsides. Nevada Stupak, the son of the man who built the Stratosphere, the highest building in Las Vegas, once reflected on what happened to his father, a hard gambler who was once offered $160 million to sell the Stratosphere, but hung on too long. “He had offers for $90 million, then $60 million, $38 million. Eventually the stock went down to zero. In the end he died alone and depressed and worth basically nothing.” Kenny Baker described some of the girls in his high school class: “This is a city of fifty-year old men with eighteen year old girls.”

  Las Vegas is a city designed to alter perceptions: gambling substitutes for income, night is interchangeable with day, the scale of excess denies the idea of limits. Residents do not seem curious about where they get their electricity or water or the political entities that control their infrastructure. Or who pays for it. Las Vegas history is framed in present tense.

  Hoover Dam was the engine for Las Vegas growth, although the senior men who built it did not live to see the era that it created. W. H. Wattis succumbed to cancer in 1931, and E. O. Wattis followed him several years later; Warren Bechtel died of a diabetic attack in August 1933 while on a trip to the Soviet Union; Tony Cornero died of a “supposed” heart attack at the gambling tables in 1955, although rumor said he was poisoned. (The glass he was drinking from disappeared; there was no autopsy; the body was sent to Los Angeles. Moe Dalitz took over the Stardust.) Henry Kaiser started his own company, Kaiser Industries, becoming a tycoon with investments in concrete, aluminum, insurance, automobiles, health care, and shipbuilding.

  Although several of the Six Companies made the transition, as Fortune put it, from contractors “whose offices were in their hats” to big-shot industrialists with contracts running into the billions, it was Bechtel that exploited the brand of having built Hoover Dam. Steven Bechtel, Warren’s middle son who worked as purchasing agent during the dam’s construction, teamed up with John McCone, a former college classmate from whom he had purchased millions of dollars of steel during dam construction, and formed a new company called Bechtel-McCone. The big new opportunities were in the energy and war industries that were looming over the horizon. Contracts for construction of naval bases began in 1938.

  Steven Bechtel and John McCone marketed their services to the large oil companies, particularly Standard Oil of California, or SoCal. They planned to build full-service energy facilities—refineries, pipelines, tank farms, loading areas, port facilities. Although the company had not been in the oil construction business before, by 1939 Bechtel-McCone had ten thousand employees and was building refineries, chemical plants, and pipelines at project sites from Montana to Venezuela. “We will build anything, any place, anytime,” advertised Steven Bechtel, later known as Steve Sr. “The bigger, the tougher the job, the better we like it.”

  Bechtel-McCone became the construction arm for SoCal. At the same time, a mere twenty years after the close of World War I, the second installment of the war loomed; World War II was a global war because of the colonies in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia held by the European countries. The US government issued contracts to build shipyards and military training bases. Bechtel-McCone opened three shipyards in California, one in collaboration with Henry Kaiser’s Cal-Ship operations. At first the shipyards were to build ships for the British navy in a lend-lease arrangement, then they were to supply the US Navy with ships f
or war in the Atlantic, and after 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor, they were to supply ships for naval operations in the Pacific.

  As the war progressed, logistics took precedence. Airplanes, tanks, ships all needed fuel to run. Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s secretary of interior, who had slapped Bechtel with a large fines for labor violations during the Hoover Dam project, was in charge of compiling a report on the locations and amounts of all of America’s energy reserves, particularly oil. Supply logistics were key to winning the war. One surprise was how much of America’s energy resources lay beneath Indian reservations in the American West. As Marjane Ambler illustrates in Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development, 30 percent of America’s untapped reserves were located beneath the Indian reservations in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana. A new mineral resource of particular importance was uranium. With the beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1943, uranium mining began on the Navajo reservation, although the Navajo miners were not told that there was anything unusual about the ore they were being asked to mine, nor were they given protective clothing.

  Although Texas and Oklahoma had a lake of oil underneath, much of it had not yet been developed. Worried about American oil reserves, Secretary Ickes ordered Standard Oil of California to exercise the oil leases they held in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and start pumping oil. (The Bahrain wells were productive, but Standard Oil drilled many dry wells in Saudi Arabia before they struck a lake of oil.) In 1944 SoCal (later the Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO) took Bechtel with them into Saudi Arabia to build a pipeline, refinery, and port. Other projects followed for the Saudi royal family. Bechtel-McCone spun off International Bechtel, a firm that became the major engineering and construction company in Saudi Arabia. As more and more oil was discovered, more engineering and construction projects followed.