Opinion ID: 1170215
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 27

Heading: Waters Reached by Pueblo Right

Text: (8) Plaintiff claims that its pueblo water right attaches to all the native surface and subsurface waters of the ULARA which by definition is the watershed of the Los Angeles River above the junction of the river's surface channel with the Arroyo Seco. Relying on the statement in City of L.A. v. City of Glendale, supra , that the pueblo right includes the right to all of the waters of the Los Angeles River and the waters supplying it (23 Cal.2d at p. 74), plaintiff contends that by simple physical principle, all of the water in the watershed necessarily flows downward to the river channel and supplies the river. Certain defendants challenge plaintiff's claim as an oversimplification. Defendant San Fernando, which extracts all of its ULARA water from the Sylmar subarea, and defendant Crescent Valley County Water District, which extracts all of its ULARA water from the Verdugo subarea, rely on the trial court's finding that the Sylmar, Verdugo and San Fernando subareas each contain separate underground reservoirs or basins with no significant amount of underground flow between them, and that the waters of the Verdugo and Sylmar basins are not tributary to the subsurface water supply of the Los Angeles River. Although the trial court made this finding as a basis for determining mutually prescriptive ground water rights separately within each basin and not because of its bearing on the issue of the extent of the pueblo right, the finding is relevant to the latter issue. This court has never held that plaintiff's pueblo water right extends to the ground (i.e., subsurface) waters of the Sylmar or Verdugo subareas nor has plaintiff ever claimed those waters under its pueblo right prior to the present action. Our prior inclusions of ground water in plaintiff's pueblo right have always been of water beneath the San Fernando subarea. The opinion in City of Los Angeles v. Hunter, supra , characterizes the San Fernando Valley as the great natural reservoir and supply of the Los Angeles River and as a great lake filled with loose detritus, into which the drainage from the neighboring mountains flows, and the outlet of which is the Los Angeles River. (156 Cal. at p. 607.) The court had no occasion to determine the outer limits of the San Fernando Valley to which it referred because all of the ground water affected by the judgments in the case before it was beneath land in the southeastern part of the San Fernando subarea within three and a half miles of the Los Angeles River. In City of L.A. v. City of Glendale, supra , the court stated, citing Hunter: Because the flow of the river is dependent on the supply of water in the San Fernando Valley, it has also been held that the pueblo right includes a prior right to all of the waters in the basin. (23 Cal.2d at p. 73.) However, one of the defendants to which the Glendale opinion applied, the City of Burbank, was extracting water only from the San Fernando subarea, and although the other such defendant, the City of Glendale, was producing water from wells in both the San Fernando subarea and the Verdugo subarea, the judgment expressly provided that nothing in it should bind or conclude that defendant with respect to the operation of its Verdugo wells. This exclusionary provision of the judgment was apparently based on a stipulation between the present plaintiff and those defendants that the operation of Glendale's Verdugo wells was not in controversy in that case. [39] Proper determination of plaintiff's pueblo right claims to the ground waters of the Sylmar and Verdugo subareas requires brief consideration of the nature of these waters and the history of their use. The Sylmar subarea, located to the north of the San Fernando subarea and including 9 percent of the territory of defendant City of San Fernando, originally contained substantial areas of cienegas, or marshes, watered by artesian springs. These cienega areas supplied the water for the buildings and original settlement lands of the Mission San Fernando which in 1808 completed a dam to capture the Sylmar cienega waters and which in 1811 completed an aqueduct a mile and a half long to carry the water to its buildings and irrigation system. No record has been brought to our attention of any objection on the part of the Pueblo of Los Angeles to the mission's use of these Sylmar waters. The only reported disputes between the pueblo and mission over water concerned the mission's use of the surface waters of the Los Angeles River at Cahuenga in the southeastern part of the San Fernando subarea. All water from wells in the Sylmar subarea is drawn from confined aquifers, that is, bodies of ground water cut off from free hydraulic connection with overlying ground water except at the intake. These aquifers reach 12,000 feet in depth, compared to the maximum of 1,000 feet of depth reached by the water-bearing materials beneath the San Fernando subarea. Between 1928-1929 and 1957-1958 there was an average underflow of 560 acre feet of water per year through the Pacoima and Sylmar notches from the Sylmar subarea to the San Fernando subarea and it is estimated that in the absence of the Pacoima submerged dam constructed at Pacoima notch in 1888, this average underflow would have been 750 acre feet. However, the flow did not emanate from the confined aquifers which supply the wells but from the ground waters which supply those aquifers. The Verdugo subarea, located east of the Verdugo Hills and not contiguous to any subarea of the ULARA other than the San Fernando subarea, contains a large aquifer capable of furnishing a substantial water supply. From 1928-1929 to 1957-1958 there was no significant underflow of ground water between the Verdugo and San Fernando subareas. This lack of underflow was apparently due to the extraction of water from wells in Verdugo and the confining effect of a submerged dam constructed part way across the mouth of Verdugo Canyon in 1895 and reconstructed by defendant City of Glendale in 1935. There is evidence to support the trial court's finding that the Sylmar, Verdugo, and San Fernando subareas are each separate basins [40] and that the extractions of water in each basin affect the other water users in the same basin but do not significantly or materially affect the ground water levels in other basins. However, it also appears from the evidence that the lack of underflow between the basins is due in large part to the ongoing extraction of water through wells and that in a state of nature with no extractions, the Verdugo and Sylmar basins would in effect be filled to overflowing, causing water that they would otherwise receive to enter the San Fernando basin which supplies the Los Angeles River. Plaintiff contends that because extractions in Sylmar and Verdugo thus diminish the river's supply, its pueblo right entitles it to have such extractions enjoined, assuming it can demonstrate a need for all the water that would thus become available to it. We are of the opinion that the pueblo right does not extend that far even if it be assumed that the maintenance of full basins to support the river's supply would constitute a reasonable beneficial use (see Rancho Santa Margarita v. Vail (1938) 11 Cal.2d 501, 556-558 [81 P.2d 533]). Nothing in the history or laws of California's Spanish-Mexican period has been drawn to our attention which would indicate or intimate that the paramount right of plaintiff's predecessor to use the waters of the Los Angeles River for its pueblo needs would have entitled it to interfere in any way with the drawing of water from wells in the then remote Sylmar and Verdugo basins. The Spanish authorities authorized and approved the founding of the Mission San Fernando in 1797 at a location 10 miles north of the nearest point on the Los Angeles River and 22 miles north of the pre-existing pueblo, and they further authorized the mission to develop the cienega waters of Sylmar for domestic and agricultural purposes without any expression of concern from any quarter over any consequent interference with the pueblo's water supply. Later when plaintiff, as the pueblo's successor, saw that its municipal needs were rapidly overtaking the available supply from the river, it sought and obtained judicial protection of its paramount pueblo right to the ground water in large tracts of land in the southern and southeastern portions of the San Fernando basin but not to the ground water then being extracted in substantial amounts from the Sylmar basin (see Burr v. Maclay Rancho Water Co. (1908) 154 Cal. 428 [98 P. 260]) and the Verdugo basin (see Verdugo Canon Water Co. v. Verdugo (1908) 152 Cal. 655 [93 P. 1021]). Still later, in City of L.A. v. City of Glendale, supra, 23 Cal.2d 68, plaintiff expressly agreed to exclude the Verdugo basin from the judgment declaring its paramount right to the waters in the San Fernando Valley, thus confining the scope of the judgment to the waters of the San Fernando basin. The historical conditions which led to the creation of the pueblo water right have long since disappeared. This court has upheld, and now upholds, the existence of that right principally because of the pueblo successor's reliance on the right in planning and developing a municipal water supply. Now for the first time we are asked to extend the pueblo right to encompass ground water in basins which are hydrologically independent from the area of the bed of the river to which the pueblo right attaches. This, we decline to do. There is no showing in this case or in our judicial knowledge that plaintiff ever relied on any supposed paramount right to the ground waters of the Sylmar or Verdugo basins or upon any inflow to the Los Angeles River dependent on absence or cessation of the extraction of such ground water, or that any other claimant of a pueblo right in California ever so relied in a similar situation. [41] Plaintiff's pueblo right in the waters of the Los Angeles River therefore attaches to native ground water within the San Fernando basin and to surface water tributary to such ground water (see fn. 39, supra ) but not to ground water in the Sylmar or Verdugo basins. Defendants Bartholomaus, Forest Lawn and Van De Kamp claim that their respective wells, although located in the San Fernando basin, draw upon ground water that is separated from the Los Angeles River by natural fault barriers and so should be excluded from the pueblo right. But these contentions are contrary to the trial court's finding that each basin, including San Fernando, contain[s] a common source of water supply to parties pumping or otherwise taking water [there]from and that [t]he extractions of water in the respective basins affect the other water users within that basin. In any event, as hereinafter discussed, these parties will have an opportunity in connection with the framing of an injunctive decree on remand to be heard on the question of whether and to what extent their extractions affect the water supply to be protected by the decree. Defendants claim further limitations on the extent of the waters reached by the pueblo right. They assert that the pueblo right does not entitle plaintiff to any restrictions against their using water for domestic, as distinct from agricultural, purposes. This question has already been decided adversely to defendants Glendale and Burbank (see City of L.A. v. City of Glendale, supra, 23 Cal.2d at p. 81), and we adhere to that ruling as to all defendants. The contention of defendants Forest Lawn and Valhalla that water used to maintain cemeteries is exempt from the operation of the pueblo right is likewise without merit. Defendant Lockheed claims that the extraction of water from its well in the San Fernando basin is not subject to the pueblo right because Lockheed purchased the property on which the well is located from the United States government which had acquired it directly from the Mexican government in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is clear, however, that during the Spanish-Mexican period the pueblo right gave the pueblo priority in those waters of the Los Angeles River flowing in land owned by the central government as well as those flowing in private lands. For example, the lands used by the Mission San Fernando were owned first by the Spanish crown and then by the Mexican government and remained in government ownership after the secularization of 1834 until transferred to private ownership by Mexican grants in the 1840's. The previously discussed disputes between the mission and the pueblo, which provide some of the clearest historical evidence of the existence and recognition of the pueblo right, pertained to the mission's use of water on land owned by the Mexican government. Since water was not exempt from the operation of the pueblo right merely by virtue of being located on land owned by the Mexican government, there was no such exemption after the ownership passed to the United States government. It is well settled that property rights existing under Mexican rule survived the change of sovereignty. ( United States v. Chaves (1895) 159 U.S. 452 [40 L.Ed. 215, 16 S.Ct. 57]; Teschemacher v. Thompson (1861) 18 Cal. 11.) [42] Consequently, the antecedent ownership of Lockheed's land by the United States government does not affect the subjection of water underlying that land to the pueblo right.