Utahns should breathe a sigh of relief that Gov. Gary Herbert has backed away from signing an agreement with Nevada that would allocate groundwater beneath Snake Valley. He did that because a Nevada Supreme Court ruling this week probably will cause that state's chief water rights official to reopen hearings to those protesting a plan by Las Vegas to pump water from beneath that valley and pipe it 300 miles south.

Snake Valley straddles the line between the two states. The proposed agreement would allot half of the groundwater beneath it to each state. However, Utahns are rightly concerned that the amounts of available water that the agreement specifies are larger than what could safely be removed without having catastrophic environmental consequences, not only to Snake Valley but to other areas of Utah downwind.

Thanks to the ruling by Nevada's highest court, the people of Utah who are opposed to the Las Vegas pump-and-pipeline scheme likely will have a new opportunity to present their objections before the state engineer of the Silver State. He's the guy who awards water rights.

In 1989, Las Vegas water officials applied for the water rights necessary to drill hundreds of wells in the valleys of eastern Nevada and pipe hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of groundwater south to the thirsty gambling metropolis. At the time, Nevada law required the state engineer to rule on such applications within a year after the close of the protest period. However, in 2003 the Nevada Legislature passed a new law allowing the state engineer to postpone action on pending applications from cities. The question before the high court was whether this 2003 law was retroactive. If not, by failing to rule within a year of the end of protests, the state engineer had violated his duty. This is what the court held.

Now a lower court must decide whether the Southern Nevada Water Authority must file new groundwater applications or the state engineer must reopen the protest period. We presume that in either case, interested parties in Utah, including residents of Snake Valley, will have an opportunity to be heard by the Nevada state engineer.

We hope that this would lead to renewed scientific study of the aquifers beneath Snake Valley and others in this region. Experts suspect that withdrawing 50,000 acre-feet of water from beneath that valley, the amount SNWA has asked, would be unsustainable and could turn it and the neighboring valleys into a dustbowl.

Until this process plays out, Utah should not sign any agreement with Nevada.