When California imposed its first-ever regulation on the extraction of water from underground aquifers in 2014, it gave environmental teams a landmark victory of their decades-long effort to overtake water use legal guidelines.
It was additionally a political setback for farmers, who’re California’s main water customers and have relied on wells to irrigate their crops as more and more frequent droughts cut back floor water in rivers and reservoirs.
Nonetheless, whereas groundwater regulation ended one entrance in California’s unending political and authorized battles over allocation of water, it merely set the stage for a good greater battle over floor water rights, notably these pre-dating 1914, when the state first started controlling diversions.
Simply months after the groundwater regulation’s enactment, with drought nonetheless gripping the state, the water rights battle was joined when the state Water Sources Management Board tried to curtail diversions by some pre-1914 rights holders.
The board accused a small water system on the southern fringe of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, Byron-Bethany Irrigation District, of ignoring its curtailment order and persevering with to take water from the Delta for 13 days.
“We’re a take a look at case,” Byron-Bethany’s supervisor, Rick Gilmore, mentioned on the time. “I believe this has turn out to be a bigger challenge. I believe the water board needs to make use of this as a precedent to allow them to begin to achieve extra management over senior water proper customers.”
An instantaneous confrontation was averted, however the underlying battle continued and final yr the state court docket of enchantment declared that the board lacked emergency curtailment authority over senior rights holders.
In the meantime, 2022 noticed one other conflict involving one other small water company that ignored curtailment orders on the Shasta River a number of miles south of the Oregon border. The Shasta River Water Affiliation’s farmers and ranchers continued to faucet the river and later paid small fines.
The court docket choice and the Shasta River case fired up a long-standing drive by environmental teams to scale back diversions that injury wildlife habitat, contending that pre-1914 rights replicate exploitive and even racist nineteenth century attitudes incompatible with local weather change and twenty first century societal mores.
Water rights reformers have pressed the board to aggressively invoke the “public belief doctrine” of California water legislation and the state structure’s declaration that water use have to be cheap.
Regardless of its clashes over curtailment orders, the water board has been reluctant to have interaction in a sweeping political and authorized struggle. It did, nevertheless, underwrite analysis by UC Berkeley’s Heart for Legislation, Vitality and the Atmosphere on the powers wanted to curtail diversions throughout droughts.
The ensuing report, issued in April, declared that “the state must implement curtailments frequently, not solely in occasions of utmost disaster. Routine curtailments already occur in different western states. California can’t afford to stay an outlier.”
Not surprisingly, three payments have been launched within the Legislature to offer the water board the authority instructed within the UC Berkeley examine, pitting water rights reformers in opposition to agricultural and municipal water businesses.
Though advocates contend that the payments would merely give the water board much-needed managerial instruments, a coalition of water districts and agricultural teams see them as a prelude to the wholesale abrogation of their water rights. The board may achieve the “potential to strip public businesses of water rights which were used to maintain communities for many years,” with decrees of “arbitrary outcomes,” they wrote in an opposition letter.
All three measures, Meeting Invoice 1337, Meeting Invoice 460 and Senate Invoice 389, survived preliminary ground votes however the political battle is simply starting. Their destiny may relaxation in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s arms as highly effective pursuits conflict over a bedrock challenge – who prevails when there’s not sufficient water to fulfill all calls for.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.
