The dismissal of Nevada's top water regulator
Plus: The stalled Colorado River talks and the uneven price of water in the West.
Hello, and welcome to Invisible Waters. I’ve been working this month to meet an end-of-the-year writing deadline for my book publisher, but I wanted to come up for air to get at least one more newsletter out before the end of the year. I also wanted to share a little bit about the Nevada State Engineer’s abrupt departure.
As always, please reach out if you have any questions. You can support my work by sharing with colleagues or subscribing. All best and happy holiday season. Stay safe and well, Daniel
Last Friday, Nevada officials confirmed to the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the state’s top water regulator, Adam Sullivan, was no longer in his role, but offered no clues as to his sudden departure, except to “[wish] him well on his future endeavors.”
The end to his tenure as State Engineer has raised many questions. I’m sure more will trickle out in the coming days, as reporters ask quesitons. The Nevada Independent’s Tabitha Mueller talked to Sullivan who said he faced pressure from the governor’s office and his dismissal “didn’t come as a complete surprise, but it was a shock.”
“There was pressure to rescind decisions or accelerate decisions, or withhold decisions, or to not attend public meetings.”
Here’s a little more of what I know:
Already, one of Sullivan’s major initiatives has been put on hold. On Thursday last week, the acting State Engineer emailed members of a Humboldt River working group that the Nevada Division of Water Resources would postpone its next meeting. Later in the email, he confirmed that the state would postpone a draft regulatory order to offset the effects of groundwater pumping on streamflow depletion.
The process to get a draft order has been a significant undertaking. At about 330 miles long, the Humboldt drains entirely within Nevada and spans multiple counties and 34 groundwater basins. It supports massive gold mines and agricultural economies along I-80, but with more rights to use water than there is water to go around sustainably.
The draft order was expected to come out this month. Now it is on an indefinite hold.
In recent weeks, Nevada Gold Mines — a joint-venture between multinational gold miners Barrick and Newmont — sent letters criticizing the modeling used to inform the decision-making, and urged the State Engineer to hold off on issuing a draft order.
According to an outline of the order, the draft document would have detailed how the state could approach groundwater curtailment in the Humboldt, where pumping water from connected aquifers has reduced streamflow for priority downstream irrigators.
The draft order contemplated the creation of Capture Management Zones in which groundwater users would need to mitigate impacts on streamflow through offsets or market-based mechanisms — or face curtailment after a five year window. According to an outline of the draft, the document release was meant to further discussions.
The draft curtailment order is a framework that shows how curtailment could work: when it would be triggered, how and where it would be applied, and what the parameters and options are for water users to avoid curtailment. Distributing a draft for public review provides a basis for clarity, dialogue and collaboration. This is about ensuring that the process moves along with open eyes and an open mind, shaped with stakeholder input. It is not about imposing immediate cuts.
But it signaled that cuts could come.
Following Sullivan’s dismissal last week, the director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, James Settelmeyer, made a few brief remarks at a Humboldt River Basin Water Authority meeting. At the start of his comments, he acknowledged that “Adam Sullivan is no longer the State Engineer,” describing it as a decision “to go in another direction,” according to a recording of the meeting.
As for the Humboldt, he said he wanted to slow down the process, citing a need to validate three numerical groundwater models in various stages of development. The modeling work by the U.S. Geological Survey, Desert Research Institute and Division of Water Resources started in 2016 after a curtailment call from surface water users, whose priority water rights were being impacted by upstream groundwater pumping.
Since then, the state has published Upper and Lower Humboldt River groundwater models to help inform decision-making. The final Middle Humboldt River model from the USGS has not been published, but provisional model files were recently released and hydrogeologists have presented on Middle Humboldt modeling for years at many professional workshops and in public meetings. Like most groundwater modeling and decision-support tools, these releases have described uncertainties and limitations.
Cognizant of this, the outline of the draft order flagged three areas, in particular, as needing special attention about whether there was sufficient confidence to impose offset requirements and curtailment. The outline also noted numerical groundwater models could be supplemented by consideration of improved data and information.
At the meeting Friday, Settelmeyer said he did not support “proceeding with a draft order at the end of this year on science that has flaws within it and is problematic,” saying a pause would give the USGS more time to release its final Middle Humboldt model and review/refine existing models. He also said he hoped the state could avoid curtailment and seemed to suggest a draft order release could lead to litigation.
But delaying is likely to frustrate downstream senior surface water users in Pershing County who’ve pushed the state for years to curtail upstream groundwater pumping where it reduces surface deliveries, including through a contentious 2015 lawsuit.
In two recent letters to the state, Nevada Gold Mines raised concerns — similar to those mentioned by Settelmeyer — about the draft order. The company criticized the Middle Humboldt model for ignoring data, being outdated, and showing curtailment may not produce results. The company, which pumps large volumes of groundwater to dewater gold mines in the Middle Humboldt River Basin, wields significant economic and political power in the region and across the state. In addition to operating mines, the company manages water rights through its extensive holdings of ranch land.
Nevada Gold Mines said that it had “serious concerns” about the state’s “course of action and its timing, and we urge you to reconsider basing any such decisions on the Model before it has been appropriately released and vetted in its final form.”
Sullivan, in a Dec. 3 reply, said “the model, while provisionally released, represents a significant step forward in understanding the complex hydrologic dynamics of the Humboldt River Basin. It is one of several tools the Division is using to inform its decisions and that we expect will continue to be refined as new data and insights emerge.” He emphasized the “draft curtailment order does not impose curtailment. Rather, it is a planning and engagement tool intended to illustrate how curtailment could be structured under existing [water] permit terms and Nevada water law.”
The State Engineer’s office prides itself on science-based decision-making that is independent of politics and interference. Especially in recent years, facing pressures for new growth combined with drought, the office has been forced to make tough calls on appropriations that has made their decisions unpopular (and challenged in court).
The sudden departure of a State Engineer is very rare, though not unprecedented.
In 1962, Gov. Grant Sawyer pushed for the removal of State Engineer Ed Muth, who had previously frustrated Sawyer by not issuing a permit for the Dunes golf course in an over-tapped Las Vegas aquifer (the state eventually issued a permit), and later, not allowing new wells for North Las Vegas. As a newspaper put it, Muth resigned after facing “strong criticism from Southern Nevada officials on his water policies.”
The state still has given no public explanation for why Sullivan was dismissed, and I focus on the Humboldt since that is where there’ve been immediate consequences.
But it’s worth noting that the State Engineer’s decisions affect the entire state. The person in the position has always faced tension over how to balance the long-term public interest with existing demand to appropriate and use water, which belongs to the public. That is to say the State Engineer is involved in many controversial issues at any given time, often involving high-profile projects. The State Engineer is charged not only with approving new water permits but also evaluating applications to change water uses and decisions to forfeit water rights, all of which have economic impacts.
It’s also worth noting that the change in leadership comes at a critical juncture as the state works to implement conjunctive management on the Humboldt and elsewhere.
Historically, groundwater and surface water has been managed separately in Nevada and in many Western states, despite knowledge of hydrologic connections between the two. Pump in certain locations for too long, and you risk wells capturing water that would naturally flow as surface water (rivers, streams, etc…). This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as a type of groundwater capture. It has created conflict across the state (and West), with varied economic interests on different sides as water users seek to reconcile the capture with priority “first in time, first in right” rules for water rights. Other states have also had to deal with how to integrate the management of surface water and groundwater after decades of policy treating them as separate.
For more than a decade, the State Engineer has been working on how to resolve these conflicts — and the challenges in regulating interconnected sources did not begin with Sullivan. In 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court issued a key ruling upholding the state’s authority to manage surface water and groundwater as a connected resource. That court case centered on the state’s ability to manage a regional groundwater flow system that discharges to a tributary to the Colorado River and where major players like Southern Nevada Water Authority, Coyote Springs and others hold water rights.
With that court ruling making the state’s authority clear, there now remain critical questions about how to implement conjunctive management, particularly for existing water rights permits, such as those at issue in the Humboldt River.
Make-or-break moment for Colorado River governance?
Water managers and government officials from across the Southwest met this week for the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. For the last two decades, negotiators for the seven U.S. states in the Basin — navigating drought and declining reservoir conditions — have prided themselves on finding the collaborative consensus-based path forward in cutting back use.
But the talks among the states have been at an impasse much of this year. Little progress has been made since last year’s annual water users conference — where everyone was sharpening their litigation stances. This year’s conference went about exactly as you might imagine. As Cynthia Campbell, a water expert with ASU, told Inside Climate News, “I came with very low expectations, and they were met,”
It all raises important questions about whether the federal government’s deference to a state-driven approach is working in a basin that supports 40 million people.
Some important words on that from Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen:
The basin state negotiators have met for years behind closed doors, without success. It’s time for a new approach. Aggressive federal intervention and the credible threat of a federally-imposed Colorado River management plan would offer political cover – or a political imperative – for the negotiators. The credible threat of a federal plan would give the negotiators the space to compromise without having to do so unilaterally and then being accused of not protecting their state’s interests.
…
To date, the development of the post-2026 guidelines has prioritized routine operations of Glen Canyon and Hoover dams over the system as a whole, a focus inconsistent with the magnitude and urgency of the problem. Prioritizing routine dam operations and hydropower generation over water delivery and environmental protection elevates the tool over the task. Seeking to preserve routine operations of the dams while imposing draconian cuts on water users is not a path to resilience and precludes alternatives that would help stabilize the system.
+ Jonathan Thompson at the Land Desk also has a good (if not extremely sobering) post on the aptly-named “Dancing with Dead Pool” report released by the Colorado River Research Group. The report chronicles the continued crisis facing the Colorado River — with increasingly less storage to pull from. Interestingly, the report (which I plan to dig into more next year) calls for some kind of entity to improve the status quo.
…the basinwide entity we envision would be inclusive, transparent, integrate multiple objectives, and address the framing issues explained above. The entity would be guided by the best available knowledge, including science and indigenous knowledge, emphasize collaborative learning and adaptive management, and provide explicit mechanisms for consensus building and dispute resolution.
+ Interesting UCLA/Natural Resources Defense Council study looking at the price of water across the Lower Colorado River Basin. More from CalMatters’ Rachel Becker:
The research team spent a year scouring state and federal contracts, financial reports and agency records to assemble a dataset of water purchases, transfers and contracts to acquire water from rivers and reservoirs. They compared vastly different water suppliers with different needs and geographies, purchasing water from delivery systems built at different times and paid for under different contracts.
Their overarching conclusion: One of the West’s most valuable resources has no consistent valuation – and sometimes costs nothing at all.
One last thing: A slow start to building up the West’s snowpack
From NOAA and the National Integrated Drought Information System:
Water Year 2026 (October 1, 2025–September 30, 2026) precipitation to date is near or above median for many parts of the West. However, much warmer-than-normal temperatures caused precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow across many basins, leading to snow drought despite wetter-than-normal conditions across most of the West.
Nearly every major river basin in the West experienced a November among the top 5 warmest on record.
Snow drought is most severe across much of the Sierra Nevada in California, the Cascade Range in Washington and Oregon, the Blue Mountains of Oregon, and the Great Basin in Nevada, with snow water equivalent (SWE) in most of these basins at less than 50% of median.
