Longtime negotiator defends role in Snake Valley

He was the first to fight it 20 years ago and is now in the middle of a dust storm of controversy, accused of dancing with the devil, of turning Judas on his neighbors.

A proposed Nevada pipeline project like some sort of Whack A Mole! game keeps cropping up at different junctures in Mike Styler's career. And while he believes he has tried to be a voice of reason in the bitter Snake Valley fight, his attempts at compromise don't sit well with those who believe Nevada shouldn't get one drop of water from the arid valley's aquifer.

"A lot of them think that maybe I am traitor to Utah," Styler said.

The fight for water first popped up in 1989, when Styler was chairman of the Millard County Commission, and again in mid-2000 when he was in the state Legislature and co-chairman of a water task force, and yet again in his current role as executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources.

"What's lost in this is that I started the fight, the gloves have been long off," he said.

What Styler fought 20 years ago as commission chairman is a Southern Nevada Water Authority petition to tap up to 50,000 acre-feet of water a year in Snake Valley, which straddles the two states.

"It was the same as now — we did not want Nevada to take any Utah water," he says.

Ten years of drought has made southern Nevada thirsty, and propelled by the fear that the state's share of the Colorado River will dwindle, the authority is looking elsewhere to meet future demands. The water authority has sought water rights in multiple basins so it can build a 285-mile pipeline to convey water to Las Vegas.

The longstanding fear is that overuse of the aquifer will threaten the livelihoods of ranchers and farmers in Utah's west desert and dry up springs and streams that support wildlife and vegetation. Many of the residents who live just over the border in Nevada's Snake Valley are just as concerned.

Raised in rural Millard County, Styler still farms half of the 600 acres he owns in little place called Oasis, about five miles south of Delta.

He says he knew in 1989 what people are saying now about the Nevada water pumping project — it could have disastrous consequences for west desert residents.

He says he also knew that Nevada is within its rights to pump right up to the border without taking full measure of those possible consequences to its neighbors.

A delegation of residents — ranchers and farmers — aware of that threat as well, sought Styler's help when he was a legislator because of a pending congressional bill that set out rights-of-way and corridors in support of the pipeline project.

"It would have put them on our doorstep with this pipeline," Styler says.