Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] That cruel joke called water law

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Mike <mike.lists@mlxvi.org>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] That cruel joke called water law
  • Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:17:27 +1200

It's pretty easy to see the many sides of this argument. But, rest assured, the final outcome will be one that benefits the government and their friends - certainly not the environment, nor the little guy. With water, it is pretty hard to argue that the guy that got here first gets it all. But equally, should someone be able to set up, knowing there is not enough water?

Then you get the really stupid stuff. Entire cities being set up and promoted where there is no water, or simply not enough. Many Australian cities are like this. But, then again, if one is stupid enough to move INTO one of these cities, then what do you expect?

Mike

Tradingpost wrote:
That cruel joke called water law
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Opinion/Our-view-That-cruel-joke-called-water-law

7/19/2008 - 7/20/08
In weeks to come, the New Mexico Court of Appeals will hear
arguments in a water-rights case.
We're sure the judges have had at least some exposure to
that field of law so crucial to this state - but we're equally sure
they'll learn a lot more from a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the
San Juan
Agricultural Water Users Assn. - 15,000 or so senior water-rights holders
along that river above Farmington.
Water law in New Mexico, it says, simply doesn't work. Will
that come as a shock to our state's "leading authorities" on
water law - or is it merely a matter of someone finally discussing the emperor's apparel?
Four other amicus curiae briefs address failings in the
non-system under which our desert state ladles out what little water's on
hand, while we refuse to find out even how much there is in our streams and
aquifers.
In spite of statutory and state-constitutional rights
granted to people with longstanding titles and long years of irrigating
their land, those rights have been high-handedly denied by one state
engineer after another, whose office has usurped our courts' constitutional
power.
How? By, among other things, turning the engineer-office's
administrative process into a nightmare of grinding delays - 18 years, maybe
longer. Hearing officers, notes the brief, are beholden to their boss, the
State Engineer, and his boss, the governor.
Those polĂ­ticos, especially in the company of the
growth-and-development lobby, appear dedicated to reducing senior water
rights - among them the rights held by the state's traditional acequias and
farmers and ranchers along the state's main streams. But they, and their
predecessors, are doing it by fiat; by decrees they don't have the legal
power to carry out.
As for the courts, which do have that power, they don't have
the money: Only a few hundred thousand dollars a year are set aside for
water adjudications - processes taking decades to get nowhere. Justice
delayed, justice denied? That's putting it mildly. Our courts, and the
water office, need vastly bigger budgets to move the decision-making process
along.
To adjudicate all the rivers and streams in our state, some
experts guess, would cost $300 million. The State Engineer's yearly budget
for water-rights determination is about $7 million.
Judges, meanwhile, are appointed to "water courts" without
so much as money to hire a clerk. Yet many of the parties who appear before
those judges are richer than Croesus. By hook or crook, they've gained
control of headgates, even entire dams - to the detriment of those holding
older rights.
So the judicial system tosses up its collective hands - and
the state water bureaucracy tries filling the vacuum, deciding arbitrarily
who gets heard, for how long and with what seriousness. In the case on appeal, Tri-State Generation and Transmission
Association v. D'Antonio, District Judge Matthew Reynolds down in Socorro
found the State Engineer infringing on statutory and constitutional rights
as a result of its water-resource management policies.
That's twice in a short period of time that New Mexicans are
seeing trial judges up on their hind legs: Earlier this month, another
downriver district court ruled against latecoming drillers of domestic wells
and their threat to a nearby farm. In effect, that judge was saying the
State Engineer, John D'Antonio, has been following bad law in handing out
well permits as if he were forced to.
D'Antonio has warned the New Mexico Legislature that it's
overdue for water-law reform. The Court of Appeals, too, should recognize
that need. And so, probably, should the state Supreme Court, whose members
might yet get a look at this case.
As for the San Juan brief, it should, in some form or
another, be laid before the Legislature. Long negligent, even when Gov.
Richardson declared a recent "Year of Water," our senators and
representatives can ignore water rights - and the cost of fairly deciding
them - no longer.


_______________________________________________
Livingontheland mailing list
Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page