The Southern Nevada Water Authority is justly proud of the rules, surcharges, rate structures and incentives it offers to encourage and force its growing number of customers to conserve water in every way they can think of. In that, supposedly dissolute Las Vegas has a thing or two to teach supposedly conservative Utah about water conservation.

Still, SNWA general manager Pat Mulroy is kept awake nights by the vision of Lake Mead and her district's growing array of alternate water sources drying up. So she is pressuring Utah authorities to hurry up in developing the legal framework that will be needed for Nevada to take its 60 percent share of the water in the Snake Valley along the Nevada-Utah border.

But, as things now stand, there is no confidence that Las Vegas can take its allotted pound of flesh without also draining Utah's blood - or, worse, its water table - in an area that is already environmentally fragile.

Mulroy claims that the U.S. Geological Survey examination of the area, which will take another two years, won't provide the information anyone needs to set up the water agreement. She says the only way to know if their pipeline draw will hurt our situation is to start drawing the water and keeping a careful eye on the results.

In theory, as Mulroy says, the agreement that SNWA and Utah might work out right away could set triggers that would force the Nevadans to stop their draw on the Snake whenever the remaining water falls below agreed-upon levels of either quantity or quality.

But even Mulroy's passionate arguments do not quash the need to wait for the best scientific research we can get before we strike any agreement. Also needed will be an iron-clad and rapid process for settling any disputes over when SNWA's draw would have to stop, and whether any of the agency's creditors or customers would have the right to demand that the water keep flowing even when the carrier itself might agree to ease up.

The process of working this out needs to move at a trickle, not a gusher.