Us all sweetened up . The thing that came out of that really was the preliminary settlement agreement, which was an agreement between the tribe and the power company. Female news anchor well, the war has raged on now for 100 years, but today, the fighting stopped, and a peace treaty was signed. Male tv reporter the agreement was reached after a lengthy set of negotiations sponsored by senator harry reid. Tv anchor according tthe agreement, the water cant be used for new growth, only in times of drought. And in times when the water is plentiful, it will be used to improve flows along the Truckee River for the pyramid paiute tribes cuiui fish. Reid i think its really a good that we have a single loset know male news anchor but still to be determined is how fallon farmers, both on and off the reservation, will fare. They have not signed off on the agreement. Chisholm the farmers in tcid began getting nervous about how the discussions were going. They either walked out or were locked out, depending on who you ask. Schank there was lots of things that impacted the truckeecarson irrigation district. The largest was they gave an opportunity for the United States fish and Wildlife Service to buy water rights. People who are on the fringes of being able to maintain their farming business basically are forced to sell out. A lot of the farmland has been purchased, the water rights stripped. Its had a tremendous effect on the area. Reid i went from being the most popular person in rural nevada to being the most unpopular. The people of fallon detested me. I came there once for an event. They were just awful. Schank when senator reid came down, there was a few of the oldtime farmers that got together, and one of them rented a gorilla suit. He was not pleased with it. Reid ernie schank is a farmer, a big farmer, and he was one of my big obstacles cause he opposed everything i tried to do. He and peoplethere were other onesthat hung me in effigy. Schank i dont think thats a true story. Uh. I, uh. I have toi have to couch what i say now. Heh heh heh christensen the farmers left the negotiations for two reasons. One was that they believed, and they still believe, that the water is theirs. The second is that they thought that they could win by fighting. What they didnt realize was that the politics of power had shifted all around them, and it wasnt going back. Schank all of a sudden, rural nevada, which once had a semiequal footing with the metrolitan areas, now we at a severe disadvantage. Chisholmand you see that all across Rural America these days, where rural counities are feeling under threat. The challenge is that in many cases, these Rural Communities were we need to think about how to right wrongs, but we also need to consider how we help these communities make adjustments. Schank this story is only one of many that are going o its all of the western states and even in the midwest now. And little towns that once thrived are just ghost towns because the people have gone to the city. Christensen theres a strain of american environmentalism that sees reclamation as having built cities and agriculture in an environment where they never should have been, that sees the destruction of the environment and the destruction of native peoples cultures and traditions and livelihoods. The negotiated settlement showed that a new deal could be crafted to reengineer these systems to restore the relationship between people and the environment. Chisholm the Truckee River is profoundly different. There are hundreds of thousands of new cottonwood and willow trees. Lahotan cutthroat trout are now recovering. There are fish now upward of 30 pounds being found at pyramid lake. Theres talk about restoring them back to spawning runs in the Truckee River. The wetlands have water rights. Managers can call for that water when they need it. Pyramid lake is recovering. Its a very different setting. To be an environmentalist working on these issues now is you can be in a position of hope. You can see things getting better. Ely oftentimes, you have settlements in any country, or you have an adjudication in a country, then its all done. Its on paper and life goes on and nothing changes. Thats not been the case here. The lake is up, the regions been able to grow, everyones benefited from it, and so you see results soon. We saw results immediately after this settlement was done. Praise the lord. Its good for everyone. Christensen in the end, reclamation did provide for growth in the american west, but not always through agriculture and makinghe desert bloom. In fact, the explosion of urban growth in the Las Vegas Valley in the late 20th century was made possible by another reclamation project. [film projector whirring] the hoover dam, which s built in the 1930s to provide water and power to california, arizona, and nevada. Las vegas really went through 4 distinct phases of growth. [slide projector clicking] it started out as a small frontier town. The building of hoover dam and the expansion of a wtime industry and economy fueled the second phase of urban growth in las vegas. [lively jazz music playing] christensen with thpostwar period, we see the emergence of the mobrun gambling city. [music tempo quickening] christensen and then, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the expansion of corporate gaming and the growth of an enormous metropolitan area. [lounge music playing] and reid was a key player throughout that peod. Heas instrumental in the gaming commission, in cleaning up the gaming industry. Reid . Tated that you wt to him and you said, look, i want you to break his legs. Rizzo no, i did not. Reid thank you, mr. Rizzo. Rizzo tnk you. Christensen . Making it acceptable for wallstreet investment. [opening belclanging] which led to a massive influx of capital and the transformation of las vegas into the city we know today. [tap shoes clack] women yeeha christensen familyfriendly, resorts for young people. [crowd clamoring] christensen resorts for retired people. Reid i watched las vegas grow, not realizing at the time that it was growing like it was, but as i look back, it grew very rapidly. [bell dings] im from searchlight, and i went to school in henderson, which, at that time, was quite small, so vegas w always big to me, and i probably didnt recognize the growth that was taking place before my eyes. Man were growing, in the last couple of years, by any measure you want, faster than everybody could have predicted. [power saw whirring] female tv reporter a new house is built every 20 minutes in clark county for a population in flux6,000 new residents each month. Male tv reporter las vegas, with a population of 1. 6 million. Its the fastestgrowing metropolis in the country. Christensen this explosion of population also led to an increase in demographic versity. Las vegas became increasingly latino, asian american, on top of its historic African American population and the white population. [overlapping chatter] it became a vibrant, workingclass union town where serviceindustry jobs paid a good middleclass wage that people could survive and thrive on, raise their families, enjoy the outdoors. Man nevadans take great pride in the Outdoor Recreational opportunities that our great unrtunatel nevada has 87 publicly owned lands, which means that most of the recreation must take place on our public lands. Regardless, protecting the multiple use of our lands in nevada is very important to our citizens. [traffic noise] baca development in nevada, and Southern Nevada in particular, started to happen fairly quickly and you could see this shift. You had the increase in the city of las vegas, north las vegas, city of henderson, and clark county butting up against the desert and starting to encroach on native habitats and desert areas. There needed to be a solution to come in to balance these interests of growth and development with maintaining our native landscapes. Christensen the solution that was first used to overcome this problem was land swaps. A developer would find some private land worthy of protectionsay, up in the mountainsand offer to swap that land to the federal government in order to be able to develop one of the public land parcels in the Las Vegas Valley. Reid they would give the federal government that land, and they would get something in exchange for it. As time went on, it became a corrupt situation. [hammering, power saws whirring] christensen the danger and fear here was that growth in the Las Vegas Valley could come to a screaming halt. Reid saw this problem and set about to craft a solution. Man n congre, the staff is staff,oure gonna have aod successful congressman or senator. Man we have both of our United States senators, harry reid and john ensign wi us. Reid i didnt know they were gonna be here. Im ready to leave. Arent you . [laughter] lopez i was with setor ensign for 14 years. He was a very pragmatic republican senator. Ensign the usda can certify. Reid john ensign was a conservative republican, but our relationship in the senate was just terrific. I never had anyone to work with in the senate that was more reasonable and prmatic than john ensign. Ensign and i had a deal. If you have a problem with anything going on in my staff, you call me. I would do the same with him. And as a result of that, our staffs knew that they were to Work Together. Lopez they brought me in the room with the top staffers from each office. We were told that you will wo together. You will not disparage each other. The staffs cannot say anything bad about each other, and if you do, you will get fired. Regardless of whatever differences we have, we are gonna Work Together for the benefit of the state of nevada. And that set the whole tone, and that set the whole tone for all the accomplishments that we achieved on a bipartisan basis. Reid we had to do something differently, and thats where the snipla came in. Christensen sniplaba. Lopez snipplema. Chisholm snipplema. Christensen the Southern Nevada. Baca blic land. Lopez management act. Chisholm snlama. Anderson truly horrible acronym. Baca its one of the weirdest acronyms, but i love snplma, yeah. Ensign this bill fixes the faulty Land Exchange process. Lopez john ensign washe sponsor of snplma at the time, and senator reid and senator bryan were the Senate Champions for getting that legislation through. Reid well change the way we do things in the state of nevada regarding land. Anderson snplma, as its lovingly referred to, was the seminal piece of legislation that created the land sale radigm fothe las gas valley. Lopez the concept was instead exchanging land, just auction public land to the highest bidder. That way, you ing market forces, and you just put it out in the open and you auction land. Man open th bid at 250,000. Open this bid at 11 million. Reid have a public auction and none of this trading business. Man now 60. Number 179 higbidder. Baca it creates a level Playing Field for everybody. Man he says hes out. 14,200,000. Close the bid here at 14,200,000. Reid the money that came from the land would go back into family sensitive things in nevada. Baca everything from lake tahoe, building parks and trails, restoration projects, investing in visitors centers. Man parking areas, access that allow people to get into the outdoors. Lopez over its life, snplma generad over 3 billio man 47. That mans a poker player, i think. Christensen in many ways, snplma built on the successes of the negotiated settlement on the Truckee River that you could craft a new deal between a growing urban area and the environment. This is perhaps an example of government at its best. It works and people dont even notice it. Chisholm for the first time, its really connecting las vegas with the environment. And for the first time, youre beginning to see how, through these investments, las vegas is getting woven back into that landscape. Christensen while snplma was a bipartisan compromise that worked in urban nevada, crafting the same kinds of solutions in rural nevada was not so easy. Chisholm so the 1990s were a time of great optimism for the environmental movement. I mean, you had a democratic president , you had Bruce Babbitt as a secretary of the interior. Reform of grazing, reform of reclamation, reform of mining were all being discussed and being considered. And it seemed possible that types of changes would be made. But there was also, in some ways, a powerful wind that was blowing from Rural Communities that were concerned about the overreach of the environmental community. In rural nevada, theres a lot of distrust of government and of harry reid in particular. In 1999, harry reid was a Democratic Senate whip. He was a master of Senate Procedures and policies, and he helped push through a wilderness bill in northern nevada. It was really the environmentalists dream of what black rockhigh rock should look like. Part of the reason that occurred is that the hunting, offroad, Mining Community didnt think it would pass, and they didnt feel like they needed to engage. Of course, harry reid surprised his staff and got it passed. Baca black rockhigh rock was a wilderness area that had been created largely from the conservation voice, but that voichad not taken into consideration some of the other interests and other stakeholders, such as hunters and fishermen and some of the more activeuse folks whod been using it for a long time. Johnson i am native american by geologist by profession. Im an outdoorsman by passion, really. My earliest memory in life is my father butchering a deer on the Kitchen Table in our cabin. Ive hunted from the time that i could hold a rifle and hold a bow. I have lived it. I have loved it. We were in opposition to that bill. The bill offered us a number of problems, as it did to much of nevada. For hunters, it was disastrous as it was for certain miners, certain ranchers, et cetera. For example, the impacts on huntersthe wilderness boundary would be a 5mile wilderness. It across the valley to a Mountain Range that we formerly hunted with no access to it at all. All of our jeep trails were cut off. Sportsmen, for example, chukar hunters, for a day hunt or for a 2day hunt to walk 5 miles across the valley to get to the mountains, to climb up to a spring, to even find chukar or other upland game, it was a physical impossibility. So it essentially eliminated entire Mountain Ranges from hunting. Christensen and this wasnt the first time wilderness bills had come under criticism in nevada. In fact, they had been increasingly controversial since the 1980s. Man im here with some full and parttime residents of jarbidge, nevada. Were standing on a road that doesnt go anywhere anymore. It used to go to some places that these people were quite fond of. Woman we need this road for multiple uses. We need it for fishing and hunting and fuel for the winter months, and we cant get to em unless they open this road up. Man the attraction for us was the scenery and the accessibility. Go camng. We need to be freend so we can hunt with a vehicle, cause older people who dont like to walk cant climb up the mountains and hunt for deer like the younger people can. Johnson the senator took a great deal of criticismin my opinion, rightfully sofor the wording that was present and the boundaries that were present and the restrictions that were placed upon this land. But to his credit, he realized that at least some of this criticism could be valid. Reid yes, a lot of them were. Johnson he sent one of his top aides, kai anderson back to nevada. Anderson working on wilderness bills with reid was a great lesson for me and sort of outreach to a whole range of constituencies, many of whom werent super thrilled that my boss was in the senate or that i worked for him. Johnson right off the bat, i mean, i had a significant level of distrust because i felt this had been improperly rammed down our throat. Anderson once you sit down with people and talk through issues, you pretty quickly come to the conclusion that even if youre not politically aligned, all the people i worked with out there love the state of nevada. Johnson there is no place like nevada. Anderson theres sort of two different venues for having those sorts of conversations. One is the sort of classic open public meeting. You take all comers. Those are important, particularly from the perspective of making sure that youre connected with everybody who would have an interest, whos paying attention in a fashion that they have an opportunity to h hava say. We would go until nobody else wanted to talk. Ive missed flights doing those sorts of meetings. People do like to talk, and its important that you hear them. [cheering and booing] that said, we didnt resolve most of the details of those wilderness bills. A lot of the work ended up happening after those public meetings, with sort of privateide conversations. Some people view things happening behind closed doors as untoward, and i think thats a real misconception. And the reason i say that is, people arent inclined to share their bottom line in public. Theyre gonna tell you what their preferred course is, but theyre not gonna tell you what they can live with. Aits not human nature, and bits not very strategic to have the other side understand exactly what youre willing to do. We would sit down with folks, whether it was in the ranching industry or the Mining Industry or in the Wilderness Community and say, look, tell us what is most important to you. Tell us what youre most worried about and te us the truth. Were not gonna share that information with the folks that you view as your opponents. Johnson kai met with me first, and then later i assembled representatives of a numbeof sportsmen groups and individuals who knew the area. Kai, to his benefit, not only met with us and the department of wildlife, but went in the field with ranchers who had similar concerns. And we expressed our concerns to kai. We laid out on this conference table detailed maps of each of the wilderness areas. We delineated needed Access Points on existing roads into the wilderness areas that had been closed off. Reid if they had a complaint that was valid, we had maps with us, and wed just change it right there. Theyd call me, is that ok . Id say, sure, go ahead and do that. Johnson at best we wouldnt get everything we asked for. Anderson at the end of the day, when we cut a deal, were gonna try to cut a deal that does as good a job at minimizing the things that youre coerned about and maximizing the things that you want. Johnson this process came to an end when an amendment was passed through congress. [gunshot] quite frankly, we got most of what we wanted as did the ranchers, as did the department of wildlife, as did some of the mining interests. And quite frankly, we have some disappointments. All in all, with that haworked pretty well. Ion is it reid my work on wilderness damaged my popularity significantly in rural nevada, but it all turned out for the better. Because after i got my wilderness legislation done, i would go to these communities. No one ever ised wilderness as an issue, because once its in place, people are proud of it. Johnson probably the closest i will ever come to a religious experience is being on my horse on the crest of a Mountain Range in nevada with a tremendous vista in front of me. You are just at one with the earth. Christensen there are a lot of different ways of using political power. One of the ways is bringing people together to craft a solution, but sometimes its using power behind the scenes. Sometimes its making a phone call. Man one of the most Important Energy sources for the Nevada Power Company is the id gardn power pnt, located ju off interstate 15 near moapa. The plant supplies nearly 40 of the wer for e las vegas community. Man reid gardner was the main power plant to take electric to las vegas when they first put it in. They located it out here next to the reservation, which is not unusual. It really just mored into e big poution factor that just put jury onto the rez. Man problems first arose in the unfinished boiler complex, when a variety of construction tradesmen began complaining of respiratory problems 2 weeks ago. Woman when i was growing up, i didnt realize that we were being affected. My friends, thking back on my life, they would cough all the time. My brother was working down there. Hed always be covered in black. His clothes would be black, his face would be bla. Heied of an enlarged heart. Lee you know, its a coalburner, so they had coal ash and they put it up on the hill. They actually put it everywhere. And of course, when it dried out, the dust blew, it would look like a big gray cloud blowing off from top of the hill right on us. Baca in the 2000s, there was a proposal to expand a coal ash pond at reid gardner, and there were proposals to add additional coalpowered power plants around nevada. Woman this is all the statements from people o2006. Baca there was a significant amount of backlash from the tribal communities and from conservationists regarng this potential expansion of coal power. Chisholm it was really Sierra Clubs Beyond Coal Campaign that put the focus throughout the country, but particularly in the west, on closing down coal plants. Lee the sierra club stepped up, and they had the resources, the attorneys, scientists, and they come in and they was helping the tribe fight this battle. Woman it is a david vs. Goliath fight. Fewer than 400 moapa paiutes taking on nv energy, trying to shut down the reid gardner coal plant. Man heres the bottom line. You at home pay for electricity made at reid gardner with your money. Moapa paiutes say they pay for that electricity with their lives. Lee we filed a lawsuit against nevada power, the tribe and sierra club, and thats where things got real. Man i am paiute. I am proud of who i am, and im proud of all of you to be here. Thank you very much. Raborn they brought home their message through a 50mile walk from the moapa reservation to las vegas that took 3 days. The tribe ultimately succeeded, convincing the public, convincing the utility that owned the plant that it was time for them to close the plant after over 50 years. [explosion] reid and so i started looking at that power plantexacerbated heart conditions and everything else. So i made up my mind i was gonna get rid of coal in nevada. I read in the paper that they were going to open new coalfired generating plants i nevada. I called mary, i called