California’s laws about water rights is an interestingly mixed system, largely influenced by the gold rush era. The eastern seaboard primarily uses a riparian system based on English common law, in which a person owning land with water flowing through it, may use a correlative portion of that water. But with the influx of gold miners to the west in the late 1840s, appropriative water rights were quickly enacted so that miners had a clear system of who had the right to divert rivers to work their mining operations.
No one actually owns the river or water source; they own the rights to use the water. Anyone who stakes a claim on a surface water source, can divert and use a portion of that water source as long as it is for a beneficial purpose. In the gold rush era, this meant simply posting notice, but in 1914 the system was formalized and all water users since then must obtain a permit from the state. And it’s on a first-come, first-serve system, meaning that anyone who later stakes a claim only gets water after the people before them receive their water. The appropriative right system was likely influenced by the miners codes of the time, which dictated that in cases where there were two non-riparian claims on a mineral source, the first person to stake a claim had the right of way. The main condition for keeping an appropriative water right is continued beneficial use of that water. Often times, and especially during drought, the amount of claimed water exceeds the actual water available, so people with junior rights get less than what they’ve claimed or even no water at all.
Sources
- California Water Blog: “California water rights: You can’t manage what you don’t measure” (Aug 20, 2014)
- FindLaw: “Water Rights Law: Prior Appropriation”
- State Water Resources Control Board: “The Water Rights Process”
- The New California Water Atlas: “Total Amount Water Used in Current Appropriative Water Rights”
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