Water is always scarce in Nevada, but 2014 was a particularly challenging year. 

Western Nevada farmers in Mason and Smith valleys faced water curtailments as wells ran dry, while, half a state away, Northern Nevada farmers in Diamond Valley were ordered to draft a plan to manage the region’s rapidly dwindling groundwater or face drastic cuts. 

The two basins are separated by hundreds of miles but had one thing in common — for decades, people had pulled more water out of the ground than Mother Nature had put back. 

The basins — and the lakes, wildlife and people that relied on them — were suffering.

As similar situations played out across the state, the issue of how to combat Nevada’s declining groundwater levels became impossible to ignore. 

Nearly all water use in Nevada (domestic wells are an exception) requires a right from the state engineer — that right grants legal authority to take and use water. In Nevada, more water rights have been issued than water exists in the state. While right holders in some areas don’t use up all of their allocated water, they do in other areas — leading to overallocation that has led to rapidly declining water levels and conflicts between water users.

Lawmakers were presented with a bill in 2023 that would have launched a program to buy back and retire water rights in some of the state’s most over-appropriated basins, a step toward not just limiting water use but actively restoring water in the depleted ground. 

The Senate and Assembly are now considering separate, but similar, bills that would implement water buyback programs, a “step forward for our state in addressing over appropriation and overpumping,” according to Assm. Natha Anderson (D-Reno) while introducing one of the bills in a hearing.

SB36 is a standalone water rights retirement bill that would establish a tool for willing water right holders to permanently retire their groundwater rights. AB104 contains similar language, while tacking on semi-related amendments requested by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection and Southern Nevada Water Authority.

“It’s not just about the next four years, it’s about durability for the next generation,” said Jake Tibbitts, Eureka County’s natural resources manager. “We can spend a lot of resources fighting about water in court for decades, but those resources might be better used buying back water rights.”

Both bills piggyback off SB176, a bill introduced in 2023 by former Sen. Pete Goicoechea (R-Eureka) that would have kicked off a formal program but stalled in the Legislature.

Though the longtime lawmaker has termed out, proponents of the idea haven’t backed down. Supporters of the concept continued to push the issue while the state launched a pilot buyback program using a one-time allocation of $25 million in federal funds. The pilot program drew more interest than the program had funding for, and deeming it a success, lawmakers agreed to bring the issue back in the 2025 session. 

“Farmers and ranchers … across the political spectrum recognize that water is moving differently on the landscape than it did even 10 years ago,” said Peter Stanton, executive director of the Walker Basin Conservancy. “Our hot years are hotter, our dry years are drier. It’s getting harder and harder to farm in Nevada … the folks who rely on our water rights system the most are not getting the water they need year in and year out.”

‘The land is only as good as the water'

Nevada receives, on average, about 9 inches of rain per year. If all that water could be absorbed into the ground, it would recharge the state’s underground aquifers. But because Nevada is so dry, only a fraction of that is absorbed. 

Across the state, groundwater was largely unused before the 1960s. But to accommodate growth and industry needs, tapping into groundwater has become routine; groundwater now accounts for roughly half of the state’s total freshwater supply. 

As a result, more than half of Nevada’s 256 groundwater basins are over appropriated, meaning more water rights have been issued than actually exist. 

In some of those basins, the over appropriations are just on paper — in theory, the basins are over allocated, but nobody is pumping the full amount of water. But about a quarter of the state’s basins are actively being overpumped. One of them is in Diamond Valley, a rich agricultural area in Eureka County where the Moyle family has ran one of the valley’s largest farming operations while witnessing water levels decline firsthand. 

Last year, the state offered a partial solution through the federally funded buyback program. 

The multigenerational Moyle family was split on the idea. Ultimately, two family members agreed to partially sell some of their rights. Denise Moyle and one of her sisters retired slightly less than 1,000 acre-feet of water at about $850 an acre-foot. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre, roughly the size of a football field, with 1 foot of water. Three acre-feet of water is equal to about 1 million gallons.

“I’m still scared to death with what we did,” she said as she heads into her first growing season since retiring them. “You’re told the land is only as good as the water.”

Through the pilot program, more than 22,500 acre-feet of groundwater — the equivalent of more than 11,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — were ultimately retired at an average cost of just over $1,000 per acre-foot.

In a 2023 letter to the state’s fiscal analysis division, Brandon Bishop, program manager at the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ (DCNR) Conserve Nevada program, wrote that it “has become apparent that Nevada should specifically define water retirement in statute to provide a specific legal framework for groundwater right retirements.” 

Getting back in balance 

Nevada can use lessons learned from the pilot program to craft a robust program, Laurel Saito, Nevada water strategy director for the Nature Conservancy, told lawmakers while presenting SB36 earlier this session, but the framework for a program needs to first be established legislatively.  

SB36 and AB104 outline that framework and, despite some initial differences in language, groups are working to introduce amendments that will align the two, Saito said.

The initial version of the bills share a similar framework when it comes to retiring a water right: sellers must show the sale would protect the state’s natural resources, it must help bring groundwater basins that have been overpumped back into balance, and it should address conflicts with existing rights and prevent over-appropriated basins from becoming overpumped.

Those parameters address concerns about retiring paper water rights (those that aren’t being used) versus wet water rights (those that are in use), said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network. 

About half of the rights retired through the pilot program were paper water rights. 

“I want to make sure that never happens again, because then you’ve just given somebody money who wasn’t even pumping,” Roerink said. “I think that’s something we’re addressing this session.”

Neither bill is asking state lawmakers for money to purchase water rights, just for the ability to implement a program, although a buyback program without funding could look “fairly anemic,” pointed out Southern Nevada Water Authority’s Andy Belanger in a hearing. Others noted that a water buyback program could be eligible for funding under existing state programs.

If either bill is passed, it would be administered by DCNR, the agency that oversaw the state’s pilot program.  

AB104 also includes measures not related to a water buyback program. The Southern Nevada Water Authority grafted on an amendment that clarifies the conditions for those seeking financial assistance to retire their septic systems, and another amendment from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection allows the State Environmental Commission to establish a water quality standard variance.  

“Instead of being a water banking bill, it became an omnibus water bill,” Allen Biaggi, a consultant for the Nevada Mining Association, told The Nevada Independent. “People were just looking for a water bill to hang things on, and this was the one having quite a bit of discussion.” 

The bills are proposed to sunset in 2035 — proponents said 10 years is enough time for the state to implement a program that can then be brought back to lawmakers for an extension if needed.

But the problem isn’t going away in just a decade.

“In no way should it be assumed that basins will come back into balance in 10 years,” Biaggi said while helping introduce AB104 to lawmakers. “It’s taken 50, 100 years to get the basins out of balance — it will probably take much longer to get them back into balance.”

No one-size-fits-all answer

Water officials generally agree that, across many of the state’s basins, conservation alone will not be able to return groundwater to sustainable levels.

“There will come a time when there will not be more water to extract,” Stanton said. “If we fail to address the overpumping of groundwater, we’re going to develop communities dependent upon water that might not be there in 50 years or 100 years.”

During an average year, the state has roughly 2 million acre-feet of groundwater available for use. 

But that water is being put to use in ways it wasn’t 100 years ago. Groundwater pumping in the state nearly tripled between 1950 and 1965, and in the 1960s, portions of the Las Vegas Valley experienced extreme subsidence “largely as a result of … large groundwater withdrawals.” The valley was regularly withdrawing more than twice the amount of water being reabsorbed into the ground.

In the Middle Reese River and Antelope valleys near Eureka, groundwater levels are declining at rates greater than 2 feet per year; in 2022, the U.S. Geological Survey issued a report estimating groundwater storage declines of nearly 300,000 acre-feet in Smith Valley.

“We can’t think of the state’s groundwater as one giant pool. We aren’t dealing with one giant aquifer,” Roerink said, adding that there is no one-size-fits-all answer that will remedy the situation, nor is there a hard dollar amount that will cure the problem.

“You would need such exorbitant sums of money,” he said. “Getting the program propped up will be a way to better target those individual basins where money might be a great salve for solving the open wounds of water conflict.”

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9 a.m. April 7, 2025, to reflect that Allen Biaggi is a consultant for the Nevada Mining Association and to correct the spelling of Andy Belanger's name.