By Michael Doyle -- Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 am PDT Friday, June 24, 2005

Sacramento Bee

In a unanimous ruling whose broader consequences may unfold slowly, the court ruled that sovereign immunity protects the United States from Francis Orff and the other unhappy farmers in the district near Fresno.

Essentially, it's up to the federal government to decide when it can be sued.

"We conclude that, in enacting (irrigation law), Congress did not consent to (Orff's) suit," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote.

Orff and about two dozen other Westlands farmers and farming partnerships want the federal government to pay them upward of $32 million for undelivered irrigation water. The Westlands district had filed a similar lawsuit, but then dropped the case in 1995.

Orff and his allies, who farm a small fraction of the Rhode Island-sized Westlands district, have since fought on by themselves.

The court's ruling Thursday means these individual farmers lack the same authority the district had to sue the government.

"It doesn't surprise me, actually," Westlands attorney Stuart Somach said. "This works well for us."

Thomas' 2,100-word opinion was fairly technical and entirely free of the passion found in some higher-profile court cases.

Its implications, though, may still resonate well beyond the Westlands district, which had joined the U.S. government in trying to fend off the Orff lawsuit.

"I think it's going to apply to a lot of districts and a lot of farmers," said William Smiland, the Los Angeles-based attorney for Orff.

Somach noted that the decision will "vindicate the ability of a water district's board of directors to make decisions for the district."

Other applications, though, are not yet immediately apparent. The decision, for instance, gives Westlands what it wanted in this specific case. But the reasoning, Somach suggested, might also preclude some water districts from filing their own lawsuits in the future.

Environmentalists, who had been closely following the case and filing friend-of-the-court briefs, voiced relief.

"Had the Westlands farmers been permitted to sue, it would have opened the floodgates of litigation throughout the American West," said Lloyd Carter, director of the environmental group Revive the San Joaquin River.

Carter, whose group seeks restoration of the river's fishery flows, specifically warned of lawsuits that might have occurred "every time the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation attempted to repair some of the environmental damage it has done to Western rivers or endangered species by cutting back on irrigation deliveries."

Hamilton Candee, senior attorney with Natural Resources Defense Council, also praised the ruling as one that "blocks attempts by massively subsidized agricultural interests to force the government either to bankrupt itself or bankrupt the environment."

The original lawsuits followed federal efforts to restore the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and other damaged waterways. Under a 1992 law, more than 1 million acre-feet of water was steered away from farms for environmental purposes.

The diversions helped protect the Sacramento winter-run Chinook salmon and other species, but they hurt the farmers who were only receiving about half of the water promised by their federal contracts.

After Westlands dropped its lawsuit, the individual farmers pressed ahead with their breach-of-contract claim.

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Source:  http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/13118271p-13962680c.html