Statement of Jason King, P.E. Administrator
Division of Water Resources
Assembly Bill 298
Assembly Committee on Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Mining
April 4, 2017
Good afternoon Madam Chair and Members of the Committee, for the record my
name is Jason King, State Engineer and Administrator for the Division of Water
Resources. Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on AB 298.
We are testifying as neutral on AB 298 as amended, NOT on the bill as
introduced. While we have several concerns with the amended bill, I do want to
get on the record that our office has used monitoring, management and
mitigation plans or, as they are commonly called, 3M Plans, as tools in the
appropriation of our state’s water resources and we believe they have
considerable value.
Additionally, we note for the record, like other water bills in this session, this bill
is meant to provide guidance on issues that our office has or is litigating. In this
instance, the issues surrounding the use of 3M Plans are a result of cases decided
by our office that have been before the Nevada Supreme Court several times and
might be back before the Court on the very issues this bill addresses. Therefore,
we want to be somewhat careful about engaging in dialogue on this matter in
order to assure we remain neutral in the performance of our work.
Although I’m not going to go through each of our concerns here, we will openly
share them with the bill sponsor and the other interested parties for further
discussion.
A couple of our more substantive concerns are as follows:
In Section 3, we propose that “monitoring” be exempt from requirements found
in subsection (6). Monitoring impacts from pumping are very dynamic. Our office
needs the ability to be able to require additional monitoring, or change existing
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monitoring, relatively quickly, and we don’t see the need for the movement of
monitoring to go through the whole formal process. If all the notification
requirements found in bill would have to be adhered to, the ability to make
changes to monitoring cannot quickly occur.
Sec. 5 and by extension, Sections 12 and 18 – We do not agree with the provision
in Section 5 subsection (2) that states that the person furnishing replacement
water is not required to submit an application to change the point of diversion
place or manner of use or for the tolling of the statutory requirements for that
replacement water. How can we manage the water resources of this state if we
do not know how they are being used?
With that, we look forward to working with the bill sponsor and the other parties
on this important bill. I’d be happy to answer any questions
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