The drought and water rights

This summer my yard will be a brown and dead affair. We have to cut our water use by 50% over last year. Watering of lawns is prohibited.



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What makes this all so frustrating is that we have rivers running through our community but we have no rights to the water. This article explains some of this.

Quote:

Two of the Sierra’s most prominent rivers, the Stanislaus and Tuolumne, run right through Tuolumne County. They cut some pretty massive and spectacular canyons, in fact. Between them and on them, 10 dams can store about 6 million acre-feet of water. And the county’s water agency, the Tuolumne Utilities District, owns rights to none of it. Turlock and Modesto irrigation districts have senior rights to the Tuolumne, while the city and county of San Francisco own junior rights. Oakdale and South San Joaquin irrigation districts, the federal Bureau of Reclamation and PG&E control the Stanislaus – all three forks of it. ... How could this be? How can so much water, in good years and bad, pass through the county and its people have no rights to it? How can it saunter through to valley farms and sold on occasion to other water customers without the Tuolumne County folks at the source having first dibs? Pretty simply, one water world veteran said. “To obtain water rights, you had to file on it,” said Cecil Hensley of Waterford, who served on Modesto Irrigation District’s board of directors for two decades but began his career in irrigation with the Waterford Irrigation District in 1955. “It’s like a pickup truck. Until you have the pink slip, you don’t have the right to drive it.” And Tuolumne County’s 22-year-old water agency holds no pinks slips on either river, nor did its predecessors, Tuolumne County Water Districts 1 and 2. San Francisco does. So do Turlock, Modesto and PG&E, all of whom have the pre-1914 water rights that are more valuable than post-1914 rights.

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This entire situation has revived the old bone of contention around these parts about the notion of water rights. An issue that is larger than just us and our ongoing drought.



Who does own the water? Should anyone own it? In normal years no one much cared to ponder this. But in a year with record drought they are suddenly very important.

via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1ikPgVL