Opinion ID: 1170215
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Res Judicata Effect of Glendale Decision on Burbank's and Glendale's Prescriptive Claims Against Plaintiff in San Fernando Basin

Text: (14) In October 1943, this court affirmed a judgment declaring that as against the defendants Glendale and Burbank plaintiff had a prior right to use all the ground waters of the San Fernando basin to satisfy its needs. ( City of L.A. v. City of Glendale, supra, 23 Cal.2d 68.) [63] The judgment being reviewed in the present appeal awards defendants Glendale and Burbank prescriptive rights against plaintiff to the very same water, based on those defendants' highest continuous use of the water for any five-year period from the water year 1941-1942 to the filing of the complaint in 1955, subject to reduction for any subsequent five-year cessation of use. This award of prescriptive rights cannot stand against plaintiff in the face of the prior Glendale judgment. In Glendale plaintiff did not seek injunctive relief because the basin contained a surplus of water over and above the amounts being beneficially used. (23 Cal.2d at pp. 78-79.) The purpose of that action was not to protect rights in water already being used  there then being enough water for all  but to preserve a potential right to water that would be required for plaintiff's future needs. (23 Cal.2d at pp. 74-75.) Plaintiff was following the procedure appropriate for protecting such a potential right against prescriptive claims by appropriators. Speaking of the riparian owner's right to future reasonable beneficial uses, this court said in Tulare Dist. v. Lindsay-Strathmore Dist. (1935) 3 Cal.2d 489, 525 [45 P.2d 972]: As to such future or prospective reasonable beneficial uses, it is quite obvious that the quantity of water so required for such uses cannot be fixed in amount until the need for such use arises. Therefore, as to such uses, the trial court, in its findings and judgment, should declare such prospective uses paramount to any right of the appropriator. By such declaratory judgment, the rights of the riparian will be fully protected against the appropriative use ripening into a right by prescription, but, until the riparian needs the water, the appropriator may use it, thus, at all times, putting all of the available water to beneficial uses. (Italics added.) For the purpose of protection against prescription. the declaratory judgment in Glendale was as effective as if it had explicitly restrained defendants from asserting any right to the water except in subordination to plaintiff's paramount right. ( City of Los Angeles v. Los Angeles Farming & Milling Co., supra, 152 Cal. 645, 653.) Defendants rely on statements in the recital of agreed matters in the pretrial conference order in the present case that each of the parties claims a right, title, estate, and interest in the water being pumped and taken by it, and that for more than five years before the filing of the complaint the taking and beneficial use of the water by each party was open, notorious, and under a claim of right. But there is no recital that defendant Glendale's or Burbank's taking of water was adverse before the filing of the complaint. Consistently with the pretrial recitals, their taking and use of water could have been in asserted subordination to plaintiff's rights as provided in the Glendale judgment. Thus, their answer to the amended complaint which they filed in 1957 pleaded, among other affirmative defenses, that there was still a surplus in the basin. Even on this appeal they continue to make arguments which, though we have found them to be without merit, furnish a colorable basis for an assertion that their takings of water after the Glendale judgment until the filing of the present complaint were in subordination to plaintiff's rights declared in Glendale. [64] We do not preclude the possibility that a party subjected to a judgment declaring another party's prior water right could start the running of the prescriptive period by unequivocally manifesting to the other party a refusal to be bound any longer by the terms of the judgment. (See Southern Pac. Co. v. City & County of S.F. (1964) 62 Cal.2d 50, 56 [41 Cal. Rptr. 79, 396 P.2d 383].) Without such affirmative renunciation, however, and in the absence of conduct unambiguously adverse to the judgment, [65] the judgment defendants were presumed to be taking water and otherwise acting in subordination to the plaintiff's rights as provided by the judgment. ( Jaffray v. Mies (1947) 80 Cal. App.2d 291, 293 [181 P.2d 672].) Defendants do not claim to have given plaintiff any notice of affirmative renunciation of their subordination to the judgment before the present action was commenced.