LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — The state of Nevada is still fighting a court battle with the developer of Coyote Springs, who is suing the state for $2 billion. The lawsuit centers on water rights they would have needed for the development.
Coyote Springs was a proposed bedroom golf course community about 50 miles north of Las Vegas. It was pitched as a mini-city, with 160,000 homes and 10 golf courses across 65 miles in Lincoln and Clark counties. It was initially the brainchild of developer Harvey Whittemore. When Whittemore went to federal prison in 2014 for illegally bundling campaign contributions for Democratic Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, he sold it to his former partners, Albert & Thomas Seeno.
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One golf course was built on the site, but the homes never were. The project was banking on 30,000 acre-feet of water, which it planned to pump out of five separate basins in rural Nevada. The state engineer, who is the chief water boss for the state, later ruled it was actually one giant “super-basin” and cut the development’s allotment to 8,000 acre-feet. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld that ruling in 2024, effectively killing the development.
That could have put an end to it, but the Seenos filed a lawsuit against the state of Nevada and the state engineer, saying that reducing the water rights destroyed the property’s value…