High court overturns ruling on PPL dams

A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday struck down a Montana court decision that had said PPL Montana owes the state more than $50 million in rent for operating hydroelectric dams on state-owned riverbeds. The nation’s high court said the Montana Supreme Court erred when it ruled in 2010 that the rivers underneath the dams are navigable, and therefore owned by the state and subject to rent payments. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said the Montana court ignored earlier federal rulings that say separate “segments” of a river must be examined for navigability — and that some or all of the river segments in the PPL case are clearly not navigable. If a section of river in Montana or any other state is found to be navigable at the time of statehood, the state owns the riverbed. PPL has argued that the rivers around its 10 dam sites are not navigable. The U.S. Supreme Court decision, however, doesn’t end the nearly nine-year-old case. It sends it back to the Montana courts to examine whether stretches of the Missouri, Madison and Clark Fork rivers are navigable, according to the standards defined by the high court...more

Go here to read the decision.