California’s current water rights and investment | Hacker News Reader

California’s current water rights and investment

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49 pointsluu28 comments

The California[1] Water Rights system is staggeringly inequitable, and is really an indictment of "democracy", where large, entrenched power bases vote just for the selfish interests, preventing progress towards a better managed, more equitable system.

There's a good lesson in there about politics and power, which I'm not experienced or eloquent enough to express.

[1] likely not limited to just California!

also fun fact: I recently learned during a visit to the Hoover Dam that its primary purpose isn't power but managing water flow to the downstream (water-)rights-holders. Power is a side-effect.

It’s not limited to California. It’s most of the western states.

The problem with trying to reform it is that the state courts have found that prior appropriation created a vested property right. Once declared by a state such a right is protected by the Fifth Amendment (as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment.) So it’s very difficult/expensive to unwind this mistake.

Is "just compensation" not a mechanism for doing this here?

Yes. So states can’t just abolish prior appropriation and move to riparian rights. They’d also need to allocate money to buy out all the old rights.

How about taxing them? Is that allowed by the constitution?

Yeah seems to me like taxing the water on its true value and thus forcing efficient usage of it would be the rational market oriented approach.

The federal government can’t put in a property tax on these rights because of the direct tax clause. The state governments could tax the water rights, but not in a way that is “confiscatory” or “excessive.”

> The state governments could tax the water rights, but not in a way that is “confiscatory” or “excessive.”

What does confiscatory and excessive mean in this case? People do have to sell off properties to pay off tax debt (some properties are exempt I guess) so I would hope water rights could be taxable even if the result is that the owners would be forced to sell the rights. Am I incorrect?

what is the value on which the tax is levied? I think if you follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion, the tax would be levied on a value that is "arbituary", since these water rights are granted, and not purchased at a market price.

I think the gov't paying to buy out all existing rights, is better than allowing arbituary taxation like this.

We assess the value of real estate for taxation purposes. We can assess the value of water for taxation purposes.

Which votes are you referring to? Unfortunately this is largely a property rights issue so not much has even come to a vote. In theory state legislators could give the government greater statutory authority to seize water rights under eminent domain and pay compensation to rights holders, but the budget impact would be huge.

Yeah, I think this can only be a criticism of "democracy" in an extremely narrow sense. Much of the situation is still determined through litigation, not legislation, whether in court or in front of the state water resources board. My mom worked for a water attorney, and I lived and worked in ag in an irrigation district that had an active case in front of the water board. In both cases, the billable hours were endless, and in the latter case, winning a defense in front of the water board was enough to get the lead attorney a promotion to senior staff lawyer at another irrigation district.

Plus sheer cashflow, not votes, is what's driving a lot of the more water-intensive ag in the dry southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The Resnicks (Wonderful pomegranate juice/almonds/pistachios, Cutie citrus, billionaire LA residents) are essentially agribusiness investors rather than hands-on farmers, and most emphatically DO NOT have senior water rights for most of their operations, but they DO have the cashflow to buy water off of more senior rights holders, and they have the nationwide distribution on the other end to keep that cashflow going. Whether that continues to be sustainable, or their heirs want to keep it up... we shall see. In the meantime, it is a perfectly reasonable business decision as a senior rights holder to fallow your land or otherwise curtail your use, and sell your allotment down the aqueduct. Fresno State has the California Water Institute which publishes a great deal of informative studies and policy papers: http://www.californiawater.org/publications/ They've noted in the past that transactions like this essentially carry no tax or infrastructure maintenance fees. That's one policy change that could easily be voted into place.

Even setting aside the financial cost considerations other commenters have expressed, getting voters behind a wholesale change is a big project. The water situation simply hasn't started to bite hard enough for the bulk of the state's urban population. I'm often skeptical of ballot initiatives and the necessarily shallow marketing campaigns that accompany them, and a ballot initiative to reform the pre-/post-1914 water rights system would need an absolutely huge, multi-year educational push and likely multiple failures and retries at the ballot box. That's not to say it's impossible, as things are noticeably changing. These days, I live over the hill from Coalinga, which almost ran the hell out of water last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/coalinga-california-faces-th...

I don't know how anyone can drink that POM stuff, its like pancreatic cancer in a bottle

The bit about Sacramento not having water meters is particularly mad.

Driving through the Imperial Valley was a big wake up call for me as to the dire state of the water situation in California. We are transporting water hundreds of miles to grow food in the middle of a desert.

The old incentives and laws are clearly not going to be enough for the future, particularly on the Colorado. As usual, no one acts until the crisis is here on our doorstep.

Why is it mad? From a system perspective, what benefits would they get from meters? Energy saving from not having to purify and deliver the water, granted. But from a state supply perspective all that water comes from and returns to the big river.

From a system perspective, the system functions better when everyone is incentivized to measure and ensure efficient use. That water both comes from and returns to the big river in time does surprisingly little to mitigate the basic limits of how much water is going in and out at any given time.

Please speak in concrete terms. Which inferior rights holder would get more water, and how much more, if Sacramento City had more meters?

I don't think there is a simple concrete answer to that, because that answer lies on the far side of quite a few uncertainties. The answer is probably a number of them, because after investing in metering and efficient usage the City of Sacramento would likely use significantly less water.

If nothing else, the big river would have more water.

Well, most of the efficiency analysis of water systems relies on meters in some way. This makes fairly intuitive sense... if you don't have any tracking of what you actually deliver to the end-user, it's hard to know what the actual in-out balance of the system is. For example, one of the most important operational metrics for municipal water systems is the non-revenue water portion. This is the difference between flow out of the water treatment plant and cumulative meter readings---and it indicates water that is lost in several different ways, most significantly (in most cases) leakage throughout the distribution system. This can be very substantial, as much as 30% in poorly maintained systems. I see an article estimating the non-revenue water in Sacramento at 10%, which is not terrible but still higher than many well-run water systems. But what's really problematic is that a spokesperson for the water department emphasized that this is a rough estimate because of the lack of meters on about half of their user connections.

The lack of meters makes it basically impossible to perform a "water audit," a best practice for water utilities that helps to quantify and---more importantly---locate leakage and equipment problems that lead to non-revenue water. It makes reducing the non-revenue portion very difficult since there is no real accounting of where losses occur. This makes costs higher for everyone, and also means that some of the water extracted from the river is taking an uncertain return path that greatly increases risk of contamination by urban pollutants in the vadose zone. It also makes it difficult to quantify some non-return dispositions of water like evaporation, not only for the utility but for customers.

Indeed, the 10% estimate they are producing right now is based on modeling of river extraction and return rates and aquifer levels. So they are basically trying to estimate their non-revenue based on the difference between what they take out of the river and what they put back in, but that is very difficult and gives little information on where the actual problems are.

Transporting water to grow food isn't default a bad idea, if growing in one place is better than another and makes up for the transportation costs. Growing in warmer climates means crops are less likely to be lost due to frost, and it allows greater variety of crops to be available at different times of the year.

Water management is a huge deal, and we're doing it terribly. Lots of variables to balance, not just water but also resilience to changes in weather, variety available in different seasons, efficient water usage, crop rotation & soil usage, etc. Hard to say definitively any given practice is absolutely good or bad without a broader context of where it fits in the overall package.

The article is incorrect about the water meters.

I lived in Sacramento city limits for 6 years. We most definitely had metered water.

In fact I had a friend, also in sac city, who had a broken water pipe. It was underground and not visible. The bill for 1 month was over $3,000. It was metered. (Luckily, some grant program paid/reduced the bill)

The article is from 2009 and more water meters have been installed.

> [E]very customer within the SSWD service area will have a water meter by 2025 as mandated by State law. In February 2004, the Board approved a Water Meter Retrofit Plan which outlines the criteria used to determine when an area within the District will receive water meters. For more information on the Water Meter Retrofit Plan go to sswd.org.

https://www.sswd.org/departments/engineering/capital-improve...

> Sacramento County Water Agency has approximately 90% of our customers with water meters. We are currently on our last phase of new meter installation in Laguna with plans for completion by the end of this year.

https://waterresources.saccounty.gov/scwa/Pages/Water-Meteri...

You’re growing food in a valley with amazing soil and great weather. Seems pretty smart to divert water to grow crops rather than letting the water just run into the ocean?

Thie reminds me Chinatown, which is inspired by California water wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars

How much for a billboard on I-5 that says "60% of the state's water for 2% of the economy"

(2009)

Water rights haven't changed

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