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Don't think the name is that stupid. Has a western tone to it.
As far as sprawl it is bound to happen througouth the SW. Coyote Springs is to be as sensitive to the environment as possible
That site was chosen because more than 80% of the land in NV is owned by the feds.
The LV valley will be totally build out is some 20 years, so satellite communities are the only option for growth for good or for bad.
Diverting water used for farms and ranches, which provide wildlife habitat, and piping it onto golf courses and lawns is probably the single most destructive thing that can be done in Nevada.
I would however point out to both of you that over pumping aquifers is a cherished tradition in NV and was done almost exclusively by agricultural interests. Even in Las Vegas the roots of the vast overpumpage possibility was laid down by agricultural use combined with State Engineer policy. The old River for instance was consdered to be a non-beneficial use and the aquifer was deliberately over subscribed enough to prevent artesian flow and kill off the trees and plants that grew along the river
The Nye county overpumpage was caused almost exclusively by permits granted to cotton farmers. Can't get it back into the bag now...and the addition of domestic wells continues to make it worse. When a home is sold in Pahrump you get a recorded document warning you that your well is gonna drop two feet a year.
Homes with lawns are actually a lot worse than golf courses. Though in fact suburban use is pretty water rich. Than again so is growing alfalfa.
You never know, i dont doubt stuff like this because, in the late 80's the city of Rio Rancho, New Mexico was incorporated, at the time it only had about 9,000 people living there, it was a little tiny area of homes known as the Rio Rancho estates, developed when the New Yorkers arived in Rio Rancho 15 years earlier. In 2000 the population was at 49,000 and for the 2008 estimate it is at 91,000 already, it is new mexico's third largest city and past Santa Fe about 2 years ago.
I belive in Coyote Springs!
I believe in strengthaning the cities we already have. When Dayton started getting built up - promises were coming constantly - new townhomes, a new lake, hospital, affordable housing... etc. None of that happened. Costco and Walmart are rumored to have land here and even after 3 years of hearing this - people still talk and get confused about it. Growth slowed down - but the infrastructure can't keep up - still no hospital, only one store, one bridge over the river (if the bridge ever floods... half of Dayton will be going nowhere), jam-packed schools and foreclosed homes everywhere turning into meth houses.
And look at Fernely - another sprawling town with problems. And look at Carson - under water restrictions, and ongoing revitilizatoin problems - vacant buildings, run down areas right in the middle of town.
Why can't we vote proper people into office and fix the towns and cities we have instead of just building another strip mall in the desert? Maybe Coyote Springs will be for the rich.
I would however point out to both of you that over pumping aquifers is a cherished tradition in NV and was done almost exclusively by agricultural interests. Even in Las Vegas the roots of the vast overpumpage possibility was laid down by agricultural use combined with State Engineer policy. The old River for instance was consdered to be a non-beneficial use and the aquifer was deliberately over subscribed enough to prevent artesian flow and kill off the trees and plants that grew along the river
The Nye county overpumpage was caused almost exclusively by permits granted to cotton farmers. Can't get it back into the bag now...and the addition of domestic wells continues to make it worse. When a home is sold in Pahrump you get a recorded document warning you that your well is gonna drop two feet a year.
Homes with lawns are actually a lot worse than golf courses. Though in fact suburban use is pretty water rich. Than again so is growing alfalfa.
The over-allocation in some basins in Nevada came about as a result of how the state engineer back in the 60's was handling Desert Land Entries.
For those who don't know, there is a program in the federal law to dispose of BLM lands called the Desert Land Entry. Basically, the federal government would give a person a conditional permit to develop a half-section of land if they could a) develop water on the land and b) bring the land into production within five years. If a person could do this, then the BLM would deed the land over to the person making the Entry.
A husband & wife could apply for a full section, 320 acres each.
During the 60's, there was a ag boom on in the US. Farmers came into Nevada out of Texas, New Mexico, Idaho, etc, and opened up land on the DLE program. The problem the state engineer had was "Well, how do we limit how many farmers can apply for water?"
The central problem at the time was that the state engineer had no data on what the sustainable water yield was in many of these basins. The state engineer in Nevada is also required to use the best available science to answer this question, or a USGS survey if available. They can't just make a wild guess.
The USGS was surveying basins in Nevada in the 60's, but not all basins. So the state engineer's office didn't have good data on what sustainable yields were. Some basins were surveyed during periods of high snowpack accumulation, and the sustainable yields were set too high for more moderate periods of snowpack, much less years that were drought years.
In some basins, the state engineer had so many ag water applications that the engineer was handing out well permits based on assumptions that a large percentage of the applicants would fail (ie, run out of money) or not complete the DLE process, and the well permit would come back to the engineer's office without an actual certification of the water right occurring.
In some basins, this assumption backfired on the state engineer. In some basins, this worked quite well. So today, you have some basins where there is an over-allocation - but a legal one. The holders of well permits are complying with the law, the state engineer screwed up and assumed that too many of the DLE's would go out of business, and when they didn't fail, the basin ended up being over-allocated.
As to how much water alfalfa uses: Since I used to farm alfalfa and grass hay in Nevada, I know this pretty well. Sub-surface water rights in Nevada are for four feet of water per acre. It was pretty rare that we would use as much as 30 inches of water in a season. Then again, the "four feet" allocation was determined and set back in the days before pivot or sprinkler irrigation and in the days of furrow or flood irrigation. A properly designed pivot irrigation system is about 90% efficient in the use of water, whereas flood or surge irrigation can rarely beat about 65% efficiency. Areas south of US 6, where they could get 6 cuttings per year, probably did use their full four feet (and maybe more), but areas north of US 6 were what set the historic norms for ag in Nevada and is where the political power was until Las Vegas boomed.
Alfalfa is perhaps the single crop best suited for Nevada, and one of the most efficient users of water, because alfalfa came from the high desert areas of Persia, or what is now Iran. It is the only crop in US ag history that moved from west to east, not east to west, and indeed, alfalfa grows better in the arid west than it does in the east. The record for the deepest documented alfalfa root system was in Elko County before WWI, where alfalfa roots penetrated the roof of a mineshaft 87 feet below the surface.
Turfgrass roots, on the other hand, rarely express themselves deeper than 6 inches, and turfgrasses, as a rule, are some of the worst wasters of water. Without a deep rooting system, they're highly drought intolerant.
I can point out alfalfa plantings in northern and cental Nevada that have not been watered in 30 years and there is still alfalfa there, growing every spring, providing wildlife with some of the highest quality feed they can find anywhere in their habitat. The alfalfa won't produce more than one flush of growth (ie, the spring), it wont' grow as densely as it would if watered, but it hangs on for decades and decades, quite successfully.
Turfgrass, on the other hand, won't last a season without water. And if the turfgrass is of the fescue family (as many "drought tolerant" sod grasses now are), then they're worse than useless for wildlife due to the endophyte toxicity. I've seen deer that eat on lawngrasses look like they're skin and bones, despite consuming copious amounts of lawngrass. That's a by-product of endophytes in fescues.
If someone is going to over-pump a basin, I'd prefer it to be ag interests that do it. They produce something of necessary value: food.
Turfgrass is useless. Can't graze cattle, sheep or horses on it, humans can't eat it, often detrimental to wildlife. It is a complete and total waste of water. It should be simply banned in Nevada.
Why can't we vote proper people into office and fix the towns and cities we have instead of just building another strip mall in the desert? Maybe Coyote Springs will be for the rich.
There's no big cash payoff for fixing existing towns. There's no large capital gain from buying distressed properties and turning them around.
There's a huge capital gain payoff from taking raw land and plopping tract-shacks onto it, and another big gain from plopping a big-box store on it.
As such, banks will lend money to those developing new land before they lend on redevelopment.
The situation you have in Nevada (and will have for years to come) is ultimately the result of crooked politicians, even more crooked developers and bankers who funded them both. Now that the banking industry is getting their just comeuppance, you're going to see growth in Nevada (as well as many other get-rich-quick development areas in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, et al) grind to a halt as the market winnows out those developers, buyers and towns that were over-leveraged from those who had their own capital.
From 2005 onwards, I rarely saw or heard about any project in Nevada that didn't have all the earmarks of being levered to the hilt.
The bad news is that you're in for a long period of stagnation. Anyone who tells you that the "real estate market has bottomed" or "the worst of the financial crisis is behind us" is full of crap and they're trying to sell you something -- usually, their problems.
We're nowhere close to the end of either situation.
The sub-prime problems are now almost over (in terms of waves of defaults and write-downs). Now the loans that were made to "the rich" are about to start becoming the news. When you hear of "Alt-A" and "Option ARM" loans defaulting and taking down banks, you're hearing of "the rich" defaulting on their mortgages.
Hopefully, the combination of decreased property values and $4+/gallon gas should either put a stop to or prevent the full plan from being carried out. Coyote Springs will be nothing but a bedroom community, there will be no idustry or buisness in the town except for a few stores. And since the closest major employer in Vegas (Nellis AFB) is over 60 miles away, and its about 75 miles to downtown/the strip, no one in their right mind will want to commute from there.
To me, Coyote Springs has the name of a sprawl suburb with a lot of fast food chains. I don't see any chance whatsoever that could be a city that would draw people from all around to go live in.
I've been thinking for years that NEVADA would be ideal for a new kind of city. Try to model it on the architecture of Barcelona or New Orleans or a very famous world city that attracts people because of its beautiful architecture, etc. Make things incredibly liveable, European or Asian style where people live above the stores...and can walk around and get everything they need.
The name 'Coyote Springs' doesn't sound like that kind of place, but sounds more like a very car-oriented suburban like place with tons of fast-food joints everywhere with heavily zoned residential areas, etc.
To me, Coyote Springs has the name of a sprawl suburb with a lot of fast food chains. I don't see any chance whatsoever that could be a city that would draw people from all around to go live in.
I've been thinking for years that NEVADA would be ideal for a new kind of city. Try to model it on the architecture of Barcelona or New Orleans or a very famous world city that attracts people because of its beautiful architecture, etc. Make things incredibly liveable, European or Asian style where people live above the stores...and can walk around and get everything they need.
The name 'Coyote Springs' doesn't sound like that kind of place, but sounds more like a very car-oriented suburban like place with tons of fast-food joints everywhere with heavily zoned residential areas, etc.
Good grief, I escaped that decades ago in NYC...thank goodness!
The name 'Coyote Springs' doesn't sound like that kind of place
Nope, it's a typical desert Southwest community. NOT the East Coast or Asia or Europe or NOLA...
Thank goodness..... again...
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Where over-allocation came about
