Poll: Vegas voters favor pipeline; others don't

LAS VEGAS (AP) - More than half of southern Nevada residents who said they regularly vote in state elections favor plans for a massive project to pipe water from northern counties to the Las Vegas area, a newspaper poll found.

But in rural parts of the state, support for the Southern Nevada Water Authority plan has dropped to just 13 percent, according to the telephone survey conducted statewide Monday and Tuesday for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

With the water authority board scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to continue preliminary work on the multibillion dollar pipeline project, 52 percent of respondents in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, said they remained behind the plan.

The survey of 400 Nevadans by Washington, D.C.- based Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. had a statewide sampling error margin of plus or minus 6 percentage points for Clark County and 9 percentage points for the rest of the state because of the sample sizes, said pollster Brad Coker. Statewide, the margins were 5 percent.

"The fairest thing to say is the state is pretty much split," Coker said.

The pipeline would stretch to the Snake River Valley in White Pine County, more than 250 miles north of Las Vegas along the Utah state line. Officials say it could cost $3.5 billion but could supply enough water for almost 270,000 homes.

With Utah residents and officials concerned about the amount of water that would be drawn from an underground aquifer straddling the border, the two states recently reached a draft agreement to wait until at least 2019 to start pumping.

In Nevada, 26 percent of residents polled said they were undecided about the project. Just 19 percent in Clark County said they were undecided.

The pipeline project was initially proposed to supply water for the rapidly growing region. Now, water authority officials warn that without a secondary source, the region could face water shortages due to a reliance on the drought-stricken Colorado River.

The Las Vegas area draws about 90 percent of its drinking water from the Lake Mead reservoir behind Hoover Dam, which has seen water levels fall more than 100 feet during the past decade, leaving a white mineral "bathtub ring" on lakeside rocks.

If the reservoir drops another 19 feet, Nevada and Arizona will be forced to reduce the water they take from the river. More severe cuts could follow.