Tam
Moore
Oregon Staff Writer
Capital Press
December 2, 2005
The little-known U.S. Court of Federal Claims is getting
a docket full of Western water cases. It’s the court that in 2001 found for
Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District, bringing a $16.7 million settlement
payment last December.
Fourteen Klamath Basin irrigation and drainage districts that earlier this
year lost a plea for damages over the 2001 cutoff of federal irrigation water
are asking Judge Francis Allegra to let the case go to the U.S. Court of
Appeals. The cutoff came in a droughty year after U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
decided it had to reserve Upper Klamath Lake water as habitat for three fish
under Endangered Species Act protection.
Roger Marzulla, attorney for the Klamath farmers, details this case and others
in the November issue of The Water Report, a journal on Western water issues
published in Eugene, Ore. His article is on the Internet at
www.thewaterreport.com under “current issue.”
Marzulla says in the $500 million claim filed by Stockton East Water District
and Central San Joaquin Water Conservation District, the court holds oral
arguments Dec. 19. Its chambers are in Washington, D.C., although judges
sometimes come West to hear part of the cases.
The Stockton issue turns on a BuRec 1993 decision to a
155,000-acre-foot-a-year contract for delivery from the New Melones unit of
its Central Valley Project. BuRec contended that new laws and the ESA required
habitat.
A BuRec contract made in 1958 is the basis for the third case, brought by
Casitas Municipal Water District in California’s Ventura County. It operates
the Ventura River Project and claims BuRec made delivery contingent on
district construction of a $9.3 million fish diversion for ESA-protected
steelhead and dedicated flows to fish habitat. Marzulla said he expects that
case to be tried sometime in 2006.
Allegra, when denying the major claim from Klamath irrigators, said he
believed the Tulare facts didn’t match the Klamath situation. Judge John
Wiese, who decided Tulare, boiled it down to the federal government has a
right to protect fish and “It must simply pay for the water it takes to do
so.”
Tam Moore is based in Medford, Ore. His e-mail address is tmoore@capitalpress.com
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