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June 1st, 2008
Via The Press-Enterprise, an interesting look at how Indian tribal claims may add to the complexity of water sharing discussions going forward. As the report notes:
“…On the edge of a dirt road, Anthony Madrigal Jr. peers over the same sage-covered, boulder-strewn land that his Cahuilla ancestors have lived on for thousands of years. But it’s not the tribal land that’s got residents of Southwestern Riverside County so concerned as much as the water beneath it — and who will get the right to use it.
Cahuilla Creek, a mostly dry riverbed that snakes through the reservation near Anza, belies the amount of water in an aquifer below.
Concerned that development in the area will draw on groundwater that belongs to them, the Cahuilla Band of Indians and a smaller nearby tribe asked a federal judge to establish just how much water they’re entitled to.
Although it is unclear what that amount will be, the tribes’ request comes at a time of drought and legal restrictions that have cut water supplies to the Inland region. The ruling could affect thousands of property owners and as many as six major water agencies across much of the 750-square-mile watershed of the Santa Margarita River that stretches from the Anza Valley to Camp Pendleton.
The tribes recently notified the agencies and some 2,900 property owners along the rural back roads of Anza, Aguanga and Sage to the vineyards and avocado groves of Temecula and beyond that they are being added as defendants in the decades-old court case.
…Now, the U.S. Department of Interior, which holds reservation land in trust for tribes, is considering appointing a negotiating team to help settle the issue, said Pamela Williams, director of the interior secretary’s Indian water rights office.
Riverside County representatives, in fact, were acting as intermediaries in the case and had sought the federal negotiating team until the county’s own departments were served as defendants.
“Actually having certainty and finality as to who owns water in a region is really a good thing,” Pamela Williams said. The negotiations “may seem painful but it’s better to know what you have than continue to use something you may ultimately lose.”
…Regardless of the amount of water in the aquifer, tribes enjoy water rights based on a century-old Supreme Court case that recognized those rights regardless of whether a tribe had used the water or not, said David Getches, dean of the University of Colorado Law School and a national expert in the field.
“And so that has been, ever since then, something that should put anyone that’s on the same river system as an Indian reservation on notice that those tribes may have superior rights … even though they weren’t the first one to use it,” Getches said.
He said tribal water rights date back to the establishment of the reservation, which in the case of the Cahuilla tribe was 1875.
In recent years, Congress has approved some 20 Indian water rights settlements, mostly in the West, said Pamela Williams, of the Interior Department.
One of the more recent cases involved the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians near San Jacinto. That decades-old dispute centered on an aquifer below its reservation. The tribe claimed in a lawsuit that an underground tunnel built through the San Jacinto Mountains in the 1930s by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California drained much of the reservation’s water supply.
The settlement, for which Pamela Williams was chief negotiator, left the tribe with $18 million for economic development from local water districts, $11 million from the federal government for water development and the right to 2 billion gallons of water each year from the aquifer below its reservation….”