Currently the Nevada Supreme Court is considering a petition challenging a law that requires that protestants to the currently proposed Spring Valley withdrawal have protested in 1989 when the withdrawal was first proposed.  The high threshold for standing to file a protest will obviously prevent many from administratively challenging the water application that is currently proposed.  That is unless the Nevada Supreme Court strikes down the law, which the plaintiffs claim is unconstitutional.  It is a somewhat ridiculous that the state would ask plaintiffs to exhaust their administrative remedies through an adminstrative process that started seventeen years ago.  While some of the protestants were not of a suitable age or did not have water rights at that time to even have a claim against the current application. 

Interestingly enough an attorney for the LDS church wrote a letter to the Nevada State Engineer expressing his concern that no application should be granted until a USGS study on the quantity of water in the aquifers is completed.  Between the Spring Valley and Snake Valley projects 141,900 acre feet of water would be pumped from the aquifers.  Remember an acre foot of water is enough water to fill an acre of land with a foot of water.  That totals over 46 billion gallons of water–an obscene amount of water that obviously once pumped will not be replaced from natural sources of water.   

 There will be a public hearing on the Spring Valley water application in September where there will be the opportunity for public comment, but only those officially designated as “protestants” from the 1989 date will be able to cross-examine witnesses.  Written comments can be submitted after the hearing for 30 days.  In this case it seems the state of Nevada is hoping to approve the water rights before the study comes out.