California's method for distributing surface water is under siege as a historic drought strains supplies and nerves.
Farmers whose water rights go back 100 years or more are being forced to cut withdrawals to help other farmers and imperiled fish.
"I've been in this region my entire life. I've never seen anything like this before," said Rick Gilmore, general manager of the Byron Bethany Irrigation District, which supplies farms and suburban water users in the San Francisco Bay area. "I believe the state of California's heading toward a catastrophic disaster, which could change California forever."
State regulators cut water rights for the Byron Bethany district and 100 or so other water users in Northern California on June 12. Some of those rights go back as far as 1903 (Greenwire, June 15).
Gilmore is considering filing a lawsuit against the state over withdrawal cutbacks and scrambling to find enough water for his district's 12,000 residents and 30,000 acres of farmland, which include almonds, cherries, tomatoes and alfalfa.
The Stanford Vina Ranch Irrigation Co. has already filed suit in Sacramento Superior Court, alleging the State Water Resources Control Board has overstepped its authority by interfering with historic rights in order to protect fish. That district traces its water rights to an 1844 land grant secured by a California settler who asked the Mexican government for permission to farm.
"If the state keeps marching down this path, certainly it's going to shake the very foundation of private property rights in the state of California to the core," said Darrell Wood, a cattle rancher who depends on the Stanford Vina's access to Deer Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River. "There's a lot at stake here."
Deer Creek is among dozens of tributaries whose diversions, the state has determined, constitute "waste and unreasonable use" and violate a state constitutional amendment that voters approved in a severe drought in 1928.
The Stanford Vina district, which amended its lawsuit last month to reflect the new water cutbacks, accuses the water board of taking private property without just compensation when it clipped rights in May 2014 and again last month to benefit the Central Valley spring-run chinook salmon and Central Valley steelhead. Both fish species are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.
But the senior water users are opposed by those who argue that shaking up private water rights is exactly what's needed.
"If you were to start out today to develop a system for allocating water during periods of shortage, you would under no circumstances come up with the system that California has adopted," said Barton "Buzz" Thompson, a Stanford University law professor and director of the school's Woods Institute for the Environment. "It is largely an accident of history. It might have worked well in the mid-19th century, but it is not a system designed for the early 21st century."
It was an "accident" that their forefathers recognized a property right in water? It was based on mining law, or maybe that was an "accident" too? Those property rights are now interfering with a fish, so they have to go. How dare they claim a human right trump an animal right? We moderns must move beyond those laws created in the "mid-19th century." Of course professor, Stanford University was founded in 1885. Perhaps that was an accident that also needs correcting. Let's just condemn it and dedicate all the proceeds to saving fish.
But with more farmland devoted to high-value crops, endangered species protections instituted over the past 25 years and water supplies dwindling to record lows the past two summers, water users are increasingly coming into conflict with each other and depleting groundwater. A water transfer deal between junior and senior users on the Sacramento River, for example, is currently in jeopardy because endangered salmon also need the water for spawning (Greenwire, June 17). "We do a worse job of administering water rights than any other Western state," said Michael Hanemann, an agricultural and resource economist at the University of California, Berkeley. "We need to reform water rights and get ourselves in shape to deal with future water scarcity resulting from climate change."
Another professor, this time who looks at the water law in this situation and nothing else and says they need reform. He totally ignores the federal law which is the primary creator of this problem. The federal Endangered Species Act is what needs reform. Reform that first and you may see that your state water law is just fine as it is.
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