High Court to Step Into Southland Water Fight

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to step into a decades-old fight among Western states, Indian tribes and the federal government that eventually will determine how much water from the Colorado River can be diverted to Southern California.

In the latest chapter of a case that dates back to 1952, the court said it will consider a claim by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California that the federal government broke the law in allocating an extra 104,000 acre-feet of water per year to Indian tribes living along the lower Colorado.

At stake could be enough water to supply 500,000 people a year, the water district claims. The district maintains that Southern California needs the water, but the Indians--the Quechan, Ft. Mojave and Colorado River tribes, see it as a crucial source of income.

The case centers on disputes over the boundaries of the three tribal reservations. The tribes contend that their reservations were larger than the other claimants recognized, and that because federal water law guarantees the tribes enough water to meet the “reasonable needs” of land they control, they were entitled to more water for it.

Boundary Agreement

In 1978, after years of legal wrangling over ancient surveys and old maps, the Interior Department agreed to the broader boundaries and allocated to the Indians the extra 104,000 acre-feet of water from the river.

Because the tribes legally stand at the head of the line for Colorado River water, and the MWD is at the end, the additional share was subtracted from the MWD, which supplies residential, industrial and commercial water users throughout Southern California.

California, Arizona, the MWD and several agricultural water districts that also draw water from the river disputed the finding and sued. They charged that federal officials made their decision without giving the state or the water districts a chance to be heard on the issue. “We felt it was rather underhanded,” said California Deputy Atty. Gen. Douglas Noble.

A federal district judge in 1983 agreed with those arguments, ruling that the government had violated several legal procedures in settling on the boundaries. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling that the federal government cannot ever be sued over how it decides to dispose of federal lands. The additional land the tribes claimed previously had been registered as federal property.

It is that narrow legal issue--whether sovereign immunity bars the states and water districts from suing the federal government--that the high court agreed Monday to review in California vs. the United States , 87-1165. But what is at stake is the water.

For now, there is enough water to satisfy all claims to the Colorado because some consumers, mainly cities in Arizona, are not taking all the water they are entitled to. After the mid-1990s, however, growth should change that and the amount available to California will drop sharply.

State water officials claim that giving the extra water to the tribes will be a hardship to Southern California consumers. Of the water available to Southern California, about half comes from the Colorado, they point out, and the added water the Indians now claim is equal to about one-fifth of the Colorado water that the MWD had been counting on.

The Indians, for their part, say they need the water allotments to make their reservations economically viable. The roughly 700 members of the Ft. Mojave tribe, for example, received an extra 3,500 acres north of Needles, Calif., from the Interior Department’s 1978 ruling. The income the tribe gets from renting that land to a large non-Indian alfalfa farmer is roughly 20% of the tribe’s total income, according to Dale T. White of Boulder, Colo., the tribe’s lawyer.