NEVADA COUNTY — After a series of setbacks, a powerhouse is back online near Lake Spaulding and water is flowing to agencies in Nevada and Placer counties after emergency repairs finished two days early.
People have been asked to voluntarily conserve water for months during two emergency repair projects. Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) spokesman Paul Moreno said crews have been working around the clock since they realized there was an issue.
“From the moment we discovered damage at the powerhouse, we made it a priority,” Moreno said.
PG&E said that with the early completion of emergency repairs, partial service was restored near Lake Spaulding.
Repairs on the South Yuba Pipe are going to take longer than expected. Earlier this month, PG&E announced that California’s active fire season was the reason behind another delay in construction. The end-of-August completion date for the pipe repairs is now mid-September. The pipe was initially damaged in February by a rockslide.
“With winter conditions and snow, we couldn’t even get in to carefully assess that situation, let alone start clearing the debris until well into the springtime,” Moreno said. “As soon as we could, we mobilized and began working to make repairs to that South Yuba Pipe.”
Moreno said everything was going smoothly until the special heavy-lifting helicopters they reserve to remove debris were pulled out of rotation by the Forest Service for firefighting purposes.
“There’s not a lot of these helicopters, and there’s not a lot of pilots that are trained to handle these helicopters,” Moreno said.
For residents like Juan Thomas who live in the impacted areas, he said individual homes aren’t seeing drastic shortages yet.
“The people who are really suffering from this are the people downstream from us, the agricultural users who use the raw water for agriculture,” Thomas said.
The Nevada Irrigation District released a graph showing the dramatic drop in water levels to areas like Rollins Lake. While water is flowing again thanks to finished repairs to the Spaulding 1 powerhouse, people who live in the area say they’ve never seen water levels so low.
A recent Review-Journal letter to the editor mischaracterized Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, also known as the Clark County Lands bill. As the former executive director of the Nevada Conservation League, I wholeheartedly support this legislation, so I wanted to set the record straight.
Sen. Cortez Masto has been working on this bill for years in partnership with state and local governments, conservation groups like the NCL and local area tribes. It’s true that the Clark County lands bill would open 25,000 acres to help Las Vegas grow responsibly, while setting aside 2 million acres for conservation. It would also help create more affordable housing throughout the valley while ensuring our treasured public spaces can be preserved for generations to come.
What is not correct is that the money from these land sales would go to the federal government’s coffers. In fact, the opposite is true.
The 1998 Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act is a landmark bill that identified specific public land for future sale and created a special account ensuring all land sale revenues would come back to Nevada. In accordance with that law 5 percent of revenue from land transfers goes to the state of Nevada for general education purposes, 10 percent goes to the Southern Nevada Water Authority for needed water infrastructure and 85 percent supports conservation and environmental mitigation projects in Southern Nevada. This legislation has provided billions to Clark County and will continue to benefit generations of Southern Nevadans. Sen. Cortez Masto’s lands bill builds upon the act’s success.
So here’s the good news: All of the money generated from land made available for sale under Sen. Cortez Masto’s bill would be sent to the special account created by the 1998 law. Rather than going to an unaccountable federal government, the proceeds would continue to help kids in Vegas get a better education, bolster outdoor recreation and modernize Southern Nevada’s infrastructure.
I know how important it is that money generated from the sale of public land in Nevada stay in the hands of Nevadans, and so does the senator. That’s why she opposed a Republican effort last year to sell off 200,000 acres of land in Clark County and other areas of the country that would have sent those dollars directly to Washington.
Public land management in Nevada should benefit Nevadans. We should protect sacred cultural sites and beloved recreation spaces, responsibly transfer land for affordable housing when needed and ensure our state has the resources it needs to grow sustainably. I will continue working with Sen. Cortez Masto to advocate for legislation, such as the Clark County lands bill, that puts the needs of Nevadans first.
Paul Selberg writes from Las Vegas.
click to expand photos
Las Vegas High’s baseball team claimed a 3-2 home win over Coronado on Friday.
Las Vegas (9-13-1) next hosts Rancho at 10 a.m. Saturday. Coronado (13-14) hosts Chaparral at 3:30 p.m. Monday.
Contact Alex Wright at awright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlexWright1028 on X.
LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Nevada’s jobless rate is holding steady, but the state is still adding jobs.
A new report from DETR shows February’s unemployment rate unchanged at 5.3 percent, with the labor force growing by nearly 3,800 people.
MORE ON FOX5: Nevada unemployment rate rises to 5.3% in January
Nevada now has about 1.6 million nonfarm jobs, up 2.2 percent over the past year and 1,500 more jobs than in January.
“This month’s report shows a strengthening labor market,” said David Schmidt, Chief Economist. ”Compared to the report for January, the pace of job gains in the past year increased from 1.9% to 2.2%, building on what was already the fastest pace of job growth in the country. While the unemployment rate remained stable, the labor force participation rate rose to 63.7%, 1.7 percentage points higher than the national level.”
In Las Vegas, employment ticked up by 1,100 jobs in February, about 0.1 percent, and is up more than 25,000 jobs compared to last year.
Reno added 1,000 jobs on the month, while Carson City shed about 200 but is still slightly above where it was a year ago.
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