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Zuni Basin Litigation Update—Did You Receive a Summons?
Your intrepid correspondent recently talked at length with Ted Bagley at the New Mexico Engineer’s Office, a person who really understands and can explain what is going on with this litigation. The scoop is below, but if you want to straight horse’s mouth it, Ted can be reached at (800) 928-3766.
You Received a Summons and…
First, we’ll deal with the immediate concerns of the few people who recently received a summons from the court. You can relax. You received the summons because for some reason you didn’t respond long ago to the water right offer package. If you have a domestic well, that offer was for .7 acre-feet per year. That’s a lot of water, and most people accepted it.
Perhaps you didn’t receive the offer, or you received it and chose not to respond, or maybe your response got lost by the Post Office or the bureaucracy, but the court has no record of response from you, so they sent you a summons to finally resolve your water right.
Here’s what happens next. If you do not respond to the summons, the court will declare your right. If you have a domestic well, that right will be .7 acre-feet per year, the standard amount. If you can demonstrate a higher use than .7 acre-feet—you have historically grown a large commercial garden, for instance, or you maintain stock watering ponds—you should let the court know immediately.
But if you just have a normal domestic well, it’s easy. If you don’t do anything, you will be declared in default (a bad-sounding word but not bad here), and accorded a water right of .7 acre feet per year, and that will be the end of it.
Will the Zunis Own My Water and Meter My Well?
In short, no. Once you begin to use water, you establish a water right. The purpose of this litigation is to quantify and lock in that right, and all the other water rights in the basin. The water rights of all users, including you and the Zuni Tribe and the irrigators in the Ramah Valley, will be quantified completely without reference to those of any other users. Nobody—not the Zuni Tribe or the federal government or anyone else—owns your water right but you.
Just as you were offered a settlement water right amount on your domestic wall, the Zuni Tribe and the irrigators have been offered settlement water rights. Both will contest that amount offered, and their water rights will only be finally settled by lengthy litigation.
When I say lengthy, I mean leeengthy. The Zuni litigation is scheduled to begin in 2010, and this correspondent does not know if a date has been established for to begin the irrigator litigation. Both will go on for many years, probably decades.
Similar litigation over water rights in the vicinity of the Pojoaque Pueblo near Santa Fe, was initiated in 1964. That was a year after the assignation of President Kennedy, the time when the hippies were sticking flowers in rifle barrels. The earliest the Pojoaque litigation may be finally resolved is 2014.
Anyway, once the water rights are finally quantified judicially for the Zuni Tribe and the irrigators that will be the end of it for them as far as this lawsuit is concerned. If, in the future, there is not enough water for the Tribe to enjoy its full water rights, it may file a lawsuit against the irrigators to force them to curtail their upstream use. In order to persevere, the Zunis would have to prove that the Tribe’s water rights predate those of the irrigators, and that the irrigators’ use of water interferes with the Tribe’s access to their full water right.
Finally, the meters. The Zuni Tribe will never meter your well. If water meters are ever required on domestic wells sometime in the future, it will only be by the State, and then only if the water usage in the area grows so large that the resource is disappearing, and meters are needed to restrict overuse.
---Tim Amsden, Editor, TRnews