For 135 years, the courts in Colorado have been the arbiter of who gets a decreed water right priority, in what amount, where it’s diverted and for what use.


regulated by the state,” Hastings said. “Sometimes it’s diffi cult to tell whether the supply is surface water. Would a California water court hear cases over surface water supplies only, in lieu of the State Water Board, or just ground- water, leaving all surface water cases to the State Water Board, or both?” Hastings’ colleague Russell McGlothlin said water rights in Colorado “are far easier to adminis- trate” and that California does not have a court system that is specifi cally geared to its complex system of water rights.


“The consequential problem is that it is diffi cult to obtain legal certainty concerning who has what quantity of water rights and who is re- sponsible for paying for solutions until you have gone through an adjudication in which everybody has their day in court and there is a fi nal judgment,” he said. “The problem is that these adjudications take decades to complete and most folks in the water industry, including lawyers, fi nd that unaccept- able.”


Watch Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs discuss water issues


Water users on the Snake River in Idaho are nearing the end of an adjudication process after about 30 years. In 1982, a ruling by the Idaho Supreme Court regarding the use of hydropower pushed the 1,000-mile Snake River from a partially appropri- ated to an over-appropriated water system. Offi cials huddled and crafted the Swan Falls Agreement, which included the requirement to adjudicate the water rights in the Snake River


Basin, the majority of which belongs to farmers.


The adjudication is close to completion, with “the result a modern water system based on the reality of the limits of a watershed that begins in Yellowstone National Park, runs across Southern Idaho and annually deliv- ers 36 million acre-feet of water into Washington state and the Columbia River,” the Idaho Statesman reported May 21, 2014.


The Snake River Basin Adjudica- tion required the Idaho Department of Water Resources and the state’s court system to review 158,000 water rights, some dating back to the 1860s. The process cost the state more than $90 million, according to the Statesman. The adjudication “represented


a state’s determination that ‘we’ve had enough, we need to conclusively resolve and determine and establish rights; it will be very painful in the in- terim but then we can move forward,” said Hanspeter Walter, an attorney with Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard in Sacramento. “At times I envy the process Idaho embarked on and the relative legal certainty about water rights it will achieve.”


There have been about 100 surface water adjudications in California. Twenty-two groundwater basins have been adjudicated, mostly in Southern California. It would be diffi cult to ad- judicate all of the state’s ground water because of the need to establish the amount of adjudicated water beneath each property.


Steps and decorative fencing on the way up to the Colorado State Capitol building.


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Western Water


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