LETTER: It’s the last thing that we should do
After reading your article about local officials urging more acreage for homes in the valley (June 16 Review-Journal), I was a bit shocked. Of course the push for this comes from the chief executive officer, Tina Frias, for the Nevada Home Builders Association. She wants more land to build homes.
What Frias and the association don’t address is the critical water shortage that we are living with. Where is the water coming from for all these new homes? Current residents are subject to fines if we use more than a certain amount, yet new homes continue to be built at around 12,000 per year. That’s about 1.5 billion gallons of water a year.
Those with the Nevada Home Builders Association don’t care if the water shortage continues. They build the houses, sell them and make a boatload of money. It is the homebuyers who will suffer.
The water from the Colorado River is a limited resource. It is not an endless supply. Nevada’s allotment of water from the Colorado has been getting cut each year, yet we allow the builders to put up thousands of new homes each year, drawing additional billions of gallons from our limited resource.
We need to be proactive in managing our water resources. Otherwise we will pay the consequences years down the road.