City of Boulder City Parks and Recreation Department revenue policy and user fee analysis

Recreation user fees and facility rental fees provide sources of revenue for the City that comes directly from the beneficiary of the service instead of from the general fund. The term user fee will be used in this analysis and will refer to all types of fees and use charges paid by participants using recreation services or facilities. There were four objectives for this analysis. The first was to determine if any Parks and Recreation Departments in the Las Vegas Valley had current revenue policies and to collect and compare user fees in the Las Vegas Valley against Boulder City user fees. The City’s Parks and Recreation Director had an interest to see what others in the Vegas Valley were doing as compared to Boulder City. The second objective was to assist in organizing the City’s data for comparison and analysis. The third objective was to research other models for revenue policies for the City’s use. The fourth objective was to provide recommendations on user fees

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Commentary: Fact vs. Fiction on Rio Grande Deliveries

Editor-in-Chief's Note: The Texas Water Journal invited The Honorable Jayne Harkins, P.E., U.S. Commissioner for the International Boundary and Water Commission to share her thoughts on water deliveries from Mexico to the Rio Grande. The opinion expressed in the resulting commentary is the opinion of Commissioner Harkins and not the opinion of the Texas Water Journal or the Texas Water Resources Institute. Citation: Harkins J. 2020. Commentrary: Fact vs. fiction on Rio Grande deliveries. Texas Water Journal. 11(1):130-132. Available from: https://doi.org/10.21423/twj.v11i1.7120

Administration of Colorado River allocations: the law of the river & the Colorado River water delivery agreement of 2003

Presented during the USCID water management conference held on October 13-16, 2004 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The theme of the conference was "Water rights and related water supply issues."Includes bibliographical references.Under federal law developed over the past century, each of the seven Colorado River Basin States of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming has an allocation to water from the Colorado River. In addition, pursuant to a 1944 Treaty with the Republic of Mexico, the United States agreed to annual deliveries of water to Mexico. This body of law is commonly referred to as "the Law of the River." Under this legal system, the Secretary of the Interior, through the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, is responsible for the operation of massive storage facilities in the Colorado River Basin. Primary storage in the Colorado River's Lower Basin is provided by Hoover Dam. Within the Lower Basin, California has a "basic" annual allocation of 4,400,000 acre-feet (at), yet has been using significant amounts in excess of this amount since the early 1950s, with recent use exceeding 5,300,000 af. While this use has been legal during this period, continued overuse of the Colorado River by California reduced storage amounts in system reservoirs and threatened the allocations of the other six basin states. This paper will present a case study and an overview of the history, issues, and operation of the Colorado River in the Southwest United States. This paper will have a particular emphasis on the increase in use of water in the Lower Basin and recent developments in the Lower Basin States of California, Arizona and Nevada. This paper will identify legal and operational issues that have been the subject of active negotiations by the Department of the Interior for nearly a decade. This effort, undertaken in close consultation with the seven Colorado River Basin States, lead to a successful agreement in October 2003 on a long-term transfer of Colorado River water from high priority agricultural users in the Imperial Valley to municipal users on the coastal plain in San Diego. The recently executed Colorado River Water Delivery Agreement provides a turning point in Colorado River management and operations: it provides the necessary agreement among Colorado River water users in California for an agreed-upon reduction in California's Colorado River use over the upcoming decades. With the successful implementation of this Agreement each state's allocation from the Colorado should be more secure, and these arrangements will demonstrate that there is sufficient flexibility within the Law of the River to meet the changing needs and increased demands for urban use of water in the Colorado River Basin.Proceedings sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Central Utah Project Completion Act Office and the U.S. Committee on Irrigation and Drainage