In an effort to provide a more comprehensive report on water, land and development issues, I’m starting a "beat sheet” breaking down the environmental news of the week and looking ahead. Let me know whether you have any tips, suggestions, criticisms or story ideas at [email protected]. If you want to receive Indy Environment in your inbox, you can sign-up here. If you want to help our mission of providing nonprofit reader-supported journalism, please support us here.

At last, members of Congress introduced legislation this week that will enable a seven-state Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) to use less water during shortages. The plan asks the states using the Colorado River to voluntarily cut back on their water use, something Nevada is already doing. The bipartisan bill is sponsored by all the senators that represent Colorado River states.

It is the beginning, not the end, of a larger discussion on how to manage the hardest working river in the West amid climate change, growth and competing urban and agricultural demands. Starting next year, Colorado River negotiators will begin discussing the renewal of operating agreements that expire in 2026. The question: What does a future with less water look like?

The biggest issues will remain in California and Arizona, whose allocation of Colorado River water dwarfs Nevada’s use. On Friday, former Interior Secretary and Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt, at a conference in Phoenix hosted by the Lincoln Land Institute, said the states have made “enormous progress” in collaborating with each other since the drought started.

If there is one lesson from the drought plan, it’s that all the states are connected. What happens in one area of the Colorado River Basin — or even outside of it — can affect other water users. Because of above-average snowpack in the Sierra, a water source for Southern California, the Metropolitan Water District was able to commit to more cuts and store water in Lake Mead. The reservoir outside of Las Vegas is so low it is near the threshold of falling to shortage levels, and the Southern Nevada Water Authority is continuing construction on an intake at Mead to firm up its water supply under worst-case scenario conditions. But for every action, there is a reaction.

When Metropolitan made that commitment, it paved a way for the drought plan to move forward without the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), the river’s single largest user, which had conditioned its approval of the plan on funding for the Salton Sea, as it has done in the past. So now the conversation across the basin, from Nevada to Colorado, has turned to split rhetoric between frustration toward IID and a desire to fix the Salton Sea, a worsening public health crisis.

At the conference, former water authority chief Pat Mulroy pitched one fix: an importation project. The Review-Journal did a good story on it last month, and I’ll be writing more on that soon. Until then...

A Lake Tahoe bill to watch: There’s a hearing scheduled for tomorrow at 4 p.m. on Senate Bill 280. The bill does not mention Lake Tahoe by name, but it would lock in certain state fees for the use of piers and buoys. Last year, regulators tried to increase the fees for permits to use state land. Under those proposed regulations, the annual fee for the residential use of a pier would have been assessed at $750 per year, up from the current fee of $50. Lakefront homeowners in Lake Tahoe opposed the increase, and the Legislative Commission punted on the regulations.

SB 280 raises the current fees slightly (it sets a permit for a residential pier at $150), but it’s a fraction of what was proposed in the regulations. And the bill would lock the fees in statute. That’s how it worked until the Legislature kicked the process to regulators in 2017. Conservationists are expected to oppose the bill. They want the higher fees to go toward environmental projects. 

Dark skies at Massacre Rim: Consider this. Light pollution obscures the Milky Way from nearly 80 percent of North Americans. That fact comes from an atlas published as part of a Science Advances article in 2016. It was also cited this week by Friends of Nevada Wilderness, which announced the designation of a Dark Sky Sanctuary in the corner of northwest Nevada.

With the designation, the Massacre Rim Wilderness Study Area, at the tip of Washoe County, became the seventh place in the world classified a Dark Sky Sanctuary, cementing the Great Basin as one of the best spots for stargazing. The Reno Gazette Journal’s Ben Spillman did a great story on the news with remarkable night-sky photos from Kurt Kuznicki, the organization's associate director. The article is worth reading, starting with a clever lede from a research scientist, or “one of those people who thinks about what the world was like before electricity.”

The politics of renewables: My colleague Riley Snyder wrote about a hearing on the effort to double Nevada’s renewable requirement by 2030. Testimony was largely positive, a departure from pushback during the last session and a reflection of changing politics around the issue. Related:  Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) is releasing a report today showing a big jump in clean energy jobs last year.

Parks & Rec: We wrote last week about a coalition pushing a bill to create a state office for the often overlooked outdoor recreation industry. There’s a hearing on it at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow.

On Monday, Assemblyman Steve Yeager presented Assembly Bill 331 to create a state grant program for supporting outdoor education and recreation groups. As written, the bill would encourage the state to disburse grants to at-risk and academically challenged students.

Grouse in the Legislature and beyond: The Greater sage-grouse came to the Legislature on Monday. The discussion came two weeks after the Trump administration loosened Obama-era rules to protect the imperiled bird, which roams 10 Western states and represents the tension between conservation and development across the rural West. The Obama-era regulations were part of a bipartisan agreement to defer a listing of the bird under the Endangered Species Act until 2020. Lawmakers and Western governors worry that a listing could halt development across the West, one reason there’s some bipartisan support for preserving sagebrush habitat for the grouse.

To that end, the Assembly held a hearing Monday on Assembly Joint Resolution 3 to support the state’s Conservation Credit System, an effort to conserve grouse habitat by taking a market-based approach to mitigation. Although the Trump administration no longer requires mitigation on federal public land, the new rules approved by the Trump administration said that states could still require it (why Gov. Steve Sisolak and other Dems like Colorado's Gov. Jared Polis backed the Trump move). Environmentalists were not as pleased and some groups sued over the administration’s decision.

Clips from the news:

• Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and other Western Senate Democrats push back on proposed cuts to wildfire spending. “It is well-documented that – because of climate change, a century of well-intentioned, but misguided fire suppression strategies, and dramatically increased development in the wildland-urban interface – wildfires across the country continue to grow in size and cost year after year,” they write in the letter.

• Sierra wildfire prep stunted by federal shutdown, heavy snow, KUNR reports.

• The Elko Daily Free Press reported on a mine cited for fatality at Jerritt Canyon.

• Scientists from the Desert Research Institute are testing a new technique to estimate evaporation from Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir on the Colorado River. The Review-Journal’s Henry Brean reports that “the old way of estimating evaporation could be off by 20 or 30 percent from reality,” a difference of tens of billions of gallons.

What I’m listening to: Montana Public Radio has a riveting podcast about Butte, Montana. It is a deep look at the legacy of copper mining in a town once called the Richest Hill on Earth. This is a thoughtful piece of journalism that leans into the complex narratives and contradictions that still inform the tug between the environment, history, economics and culture in the West.