Opinion ID: 1170215
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Relationship of Pasadena Decision to Equitable Ground Basin Management

Text: As stated above, the trial court's judgment awarded mutually prescriptive rights and restricted pumping quotas to the parties purportedly pursuant to the decision in City of Pasadena v. City of Alhambra, supra, 33 Cal.2d 908. Determination of the propriety of this application of Pasadena to the present case raises a number of serious legal questions not resolved in Pasadena. These include the res judicata effect of the prior declaratory judgment in the Glendale case, the claimed immunity of cities to prescriptive claims of public and private parties under the 1935 amendment to section 1007 of the Civil Code, the definition of overdraft, and the requirements of notice of adverse use as they bear on the commencement of the prescriptive period. In arguing that these and related questions should be resolved in a manner that will sustain the judgment below, defendants seek to reinforce their position by holding up the mutual prescription doctrine of the Pasadena case as a beneficent instrument for conservation and equitable apportionment of water in ground basins which are subjected to extractions in excess of the replenishment supply. We are urged to declare the law in a way that will preserve this instrument for future use. It is helpful to take a preliminary look at this contention insofar as it might affect our consideration of specific issues arising out of the judgment below. In the first place, the principle of continuing administration of competing rights to ground basin water through appointment of a watermaster and retention of jurisdiction should be distinguished from the rules by which the limited supply of water is apportioned among the parties. Thus, a determination that the competing rights are all other than prescriptive in nature would not necessarily preclude the exercise of such administration and jurisdiction to conserve and apportion the water in the overdrawn basin. (See Wat. Code, §§ 4025-4032 (watermaster service areas); Fleming v. Bennett (1941) 18 Cal.2d 518 [116 P.2d 442].) In the second place, the allocation of water in accordance with prescriptive rights mechanically based on the amounts beneficially used by each party for a continuous five-year period after commencement of the prescriptive period and before the filing of the complaint, does not necessarily result in the most equitable apportionment of water according to need. A true equitable apportionment would take into account many more factors. [61] This does not mean that the Pasadena decision fell short of reaching a fair result on the facts there presented. The Raymond basin had been subjected to overdraft commencing with the water year 1913-1914, 23 years before the commencement of the action in September 1937. The issue before the court was whether water rights should be allocated according to priority of appropriation or according to prescriptive principles. In deciding for the latter, the court stated that under the priority rule, certain of the later appropriations would be completely eliminated, whereas the prescriptive solution would serve the public interest because a pro tanto reduction of the amount of water devoted to each present use would normally be less disruptive than total elimination of some of the uses. (33 Cal.2d at p. 933.) The uses which would have been eliminated if the priority rule had been applied in Pasadena were only those uses which had commenced after the total amount being taken from the basin began to exceed the safe yield to which extractions were to be limited by the judgment. ( Id. at pp. 927-928.) That this cutoff point had been reached many years before the judgment appears probable from the fact that overdraft had existed for all but 2 of the 23 years prior to commencement of the action and could only be eliminated by a one-third reduction in allowed pumping below the adjudicated prescriptive rights. ( Id. at pp. 922-923.) Thus, a restriction to safe yield on a strict priority basis might have deprived parties who had been using substantial quantities of ground water for many years of all further access to such water. In the present case, none of the defendants now before us commenced their uses of ground water from the basins of the ULARA after the years in which the trial court found overdraft to have commenced. To the contrary, the amount that each defendant was using at the beginning of overdraft was substantial in relation to such defendant's later use, and there is a notable correlation between the relative levels of usage at the time of overdraft and the restricted pumping quotas allocated in the decree based on awards of prescriptive rights. Thus, the mutual prescription doctrine was not needed or applied in the present case for the purpose achieved in Pasadena  that of avoiding complete elimination of appropriative rights stemming from uses of recent years in favor of those based on earlier uses. Instead, the effect of the trial court's judgment in the present case was to eliminate plaintiff's priorities based not on the timing of its appropriations but on its importation of Owens water and on its pueblo right. It was in support of the desirability of accomplishing this quite different result that the trial court's findings incorporated the foregoing language from Pasadena by declaring that a pro tanto reduction or limitation of the amount of water devoted to its present use would be less disruptive than the total elimination of some of the uses. A possible undesirable side effect of the so-called mutual prescription doctrine is that it may encourage a race to the pumphouse after overdraft commences, each party endeavoring to increase the volume of continuous use on which his prescriptive right will be based. Of course only reasonably beneficial uses will qualify for this purpose, and deliberate increases in qualified extractions from the ground basin are likely to be possible only for those parties who have multiple sources of supply and can manipulate the proportions of the amounts they draw from each source. Plaintiff points out that if it had anticipated that its rights in the San Fernando basin would be limited to a prescriptive right based on ground water usage after 1941-1942, the year found by the trial court as the commencement of overdraft, plaintiff could easily have engineered its pumping to maximize the amount of prescriptive rights to which it would be entitled under the Pasadena formula. The enactment of Water Code sections 1005.1 and 1005.2 in 1951, two years after Pasadena was decided, may have lessened the possibility of such abuse in certain cases, but could have no effect in other situations, including that described by plaintiff. [62] (See 26 Assem. Interim Com. Rep. (1961-1963) No. 4, Ground Water Problems in California, pp. 39-40, 2 App. to Assem. J. (1963 Reg. Sess.).)