[env-trinity] UT San Diego: CA still tied to Gold Rush-era water rights system

[Tom Stokely]

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2015/apr/25/sacramento-drought-california-water-right-system/
  CA still tied to Gold Rush-era water rights system
Critics say it sets arbitrary winners, has little accountability
By Chris Nichols5 p.m.April 25, 2015In this photo taken Friday March 27, 2015, farmer Rudy Mussi poses at one of his pumps that draws water from a slough to irrigate his farm land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta near Stockton, Calif. As California enters the fourth year of drought, huge amounts of water are mysteriously vanishing from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and farmers whose families for generations have tilled fertile soil there are the prime suspects. Delta farmers deny they are stealing water, still, they have been asked to report how much water they’re pumping and to prove their legal right. Mussi says he has senior water rights in a system more than a century old that puts him in line ahead of those with lower ranking, or junior, water rights.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) The Associated PressSACRAMENTO — Ravaged by California’s four-year drought, an increasing number of farms and towns are struggling to find reliable water supplies.That’s not the case for the state’s so-called senior water rights holders who, due to what critics call an antiquated and byzantine water rights system, enjoy few limits on their water and nearly zero cost or accountability for its use, even during severe droughts.California’s water rights structure dates to the Gold Rush era, when miners and later farmers made claims by posting notices to trees along waterways. Additional rights have been established by cities and irrigation districts in modern times, though rights created before 1914 are off-limits to many state regulations.Many of these original claims remain active today, giving their holders, some who started as pioneering farm families but have morphed into large corporations, top priority when water gets scarce. It can essentially guarantee water for these senior rights holders, particularly those with land along a river, while others with lesser rights are forced to find or pay higher prices for alternate supplies.Critics say this system has created an arbitrary set of winners and losers among farms, cities and the environment, compromising the state’s ability to deliver water in a fair and effective manner during painful dry spells.Farm and water industry leaders defend the priority rights system, saying it justly rewards those who took the initial risk and made early investments in the state’s water network. They add that the structure necessarily scales back water rights and usage during dry years, preventing supplies from being wiped out.Gov. Jerry Brown told reporters earlier this month that changes to the water rights system could be coming, though he cautioned they won’t be drastic.That hasn’t stopped critics who say it needs a flood of reforms.“In an era of relatively few people and limited statewide water demand, California’s water rights system worked reasonably well. Now, 100 years later, with the same legal rules intact, California’s population growing steadily, and state water supplies shrinking due to the effects of climate change, that system has become antiquated, dysfunctional and unresponsive to 21st century conditions,” Richard Frank, director of the California Environmental Law & Policy Center at the UC Davis School of Law, wrote in a recent newspaper opinion piece.Frank added in a telephone interview: “If this drought persists, I think we’re going to be forced into the fundamental re-examination of this system. We’ve got a 19th century system and we’re confronted with a 21st century, unprecedented drought.”Protected right to waterThe key water rights in California are senior and junior entitlements. Senior rights are held by a mix of entities from private utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric Company, municipalities such as the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the private media company Hearst Corporation, started by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Senior rights holders include some current celebrities, too, including Star Trek icon William Shatner, who owns rights along the south fork the Kaweah River for a ranch he owns in eastern Tulare County, according to a Sacramento Bee report on Friday.Senior rights were generally established before 1914 and allow owners to divert surface water for what state law describes as “a reasonable and beneficial use.” They are the last rights cut off during a drought, while junior rights holders — those who obtained water entitlements after 1914 and face greater state regulation — are among the first to have their rights, and the water that goes with it, scaled back.The state lists the acceptable beneficial uses by senior rights holders as: municipal and industrial uses, irrigation, hydroelectric generation and livestock watering. More recently, the concept has been broadened to include recreational use and fish and wildlife protection.The state relies on senior rights holders to self-report their water use and maintains a patchwork of documentation of the rights. Many of those documents originated as “a piece of paper folded in a farmer’s back pocket” generations ago, said Chris Scheuring, an attorney with the California Farm Bureau.Defending the systemCriticism of the state water rights system was spurred last year with the release of a UC Davis study that found the state’s water rights collectively amount to five times as much water as runs off the state in an average year, leading many to conclude the state has overpromised the increasingly limited resource.Scheuring, whose family farms walnut and almond trees west of Sacramento but does not have senior water rights, said the criticism comes from a lack of understanding of the system and its benefits.“The perception that we’ve overpromised water rights (and) that our water rights system is crazy… rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding, I think, of the priority system and how it’s flexible. It’s an accordion, basically. It matches up the appropriate number of rights in any given year with the available water. It’s a flexible system.”Expanded cutbacks ahead?Senior water rights have not been cut back since the drought of the late 1970s. That could change this year, however, as the State Water Resource Control Board warned rights holders this month that all junior rights and many senior rights will be curtailed if dry conditions continue. The notion that the state has the authority to curtail senior rights is “a bone of contention” among senior rights holders, with many asserting that only state courts have that power, not state regulators, Scheuring added.Frank, the UC Davis law professor, said the freedoms enjoyed by senior rights holders create a mess for state water managers who seek to spread scarce supplies fairly among users. It also “discourages free water markets and common sense transfers from lower to higher priority water uses; and water rights for environmental purposes aren’t directly obtainable or recognized by the system,” he said.One type of senior water right, known as appropriative rights, can be sold or mortgaged like other property. The water attached to the rights can also be temporarily transferred to a willing buyer, a practice that’s become more common during the drought and allows farmers to make sizable profits on their excess supply. These senior, appropriative rights must be used, otherwise they can be lost.Riparian water rights are a type of senior water entitlement. They give property owners along a river or stream a share of the water that flows down that waterway. The right stays with the property when it’s sold and can’t be used on property outside the watershed where it originated. The use of riparian water rights do not require government approval.Local perspectiveMany of the state’s senior water rights are concentrated along the water-rich Sacramento River Valley, and in Imperial Valley, which has claims to the Colorado River.There are few, if any, senior water rights held in San Diego County, though the region, perhaps ironically, depends on the generations-old rights system because of its landmark water deal with farmers in Imperial Valley. A decade ago, the San Diego County Water Authority agreed to purchase huge amounts of water for 45 years from the Imperial Irrigation District, which owns some of the largest and most senior water rights in California to Colorado River water. It was considered the largest agricultural-to-urban water transfer in U.S. history, and a key piece of San Diego’s push to diversify its water supply.Dennis Cushman, assistant general manager for the San Diego authority, said it has no complaints about what others have called a broken water rights system.That system, in fact, “is foundational” to San Diego’s water supply, he said.chris.nichols at utsandiego.com | (916) 445-2934 | Twitter at ChrisTheJourno© Copyright 2015 The San Diego Union-Tribune, LLC. An MLIM LLC Company. All rights reserved.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/env-trinity/attachments/20150426/9dcde7f5/attachment.html>