Opinion ID: 1170215
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: plaintiff's reply to mutual prescription claim

Text: Plaintiff contends that its water rights are not subject to prescription, mutual or otherwise, because of the express provisions of Civil Code section 1007. Between 1935 and 1968, this section stated that no possession by any person, firm, or corporation no matter how long continued of any land, water, water right, easement, or other property whatsoever dedicated to or owned by any ... city ... shall ever ripen into any title, interest or right against such ... city.... (Italics added.) Plaintiff asserts that Pasadena did not hold that the water rights of cities were subject to mutual prescription or that Civil Code section 1007 is not an obstacle to such prescription. The sole appellant in Pasadena was a public utility to which section 1007 did not then apply. [5] All the other parties in the case, including a number of cities, had stipulated to a judgment limiting their rights to extract ground water from the basin in accordance with the formula of mutual prescription as described above. The sole question on appeal was whether the judgment could be imposed on appellant without its consent. Since the cities did not object to being subjected to the judgment imposing mutual prescription, there was no occasion to decide whether they would have been entitled to resist such a judgment under Civil Code section 1007. This view of the Pasadena case is reinforced by the fact that section 1007 is not cited in the opinion. Apart from section 1007, plaintiff contends that the prior judgment in Glendale ( supra, 23 Cal.2d 68), declaring plaintiff's pueblo and imported water rights against defendants Glendale and Burbank, collaterally estopped those defendants from claiming to have taken water adversely to plaintiff at least until such time as they should give express notice of a claim that their extractions of water were not in subordination to those rights. Defendants do not contend that such express notice was ever given before commencement of the present action. And finally, plaintiff contends that the necessary five-year prescriptive period could not have run prior to the filing of the complaint because the surplus of water did not end and overdraft did not commence until within five years before the complaint was filed. Plaintiff concedes that the safe yield was exceeded for more than five years before the complaint was filed in that the annual volume of extractions of ground water, if continued indefinitely into the future, would eventually have depleted the basin. However, plaintiff contends that when the safe yield was first exceeded by extractions, there was a temporary surplus, and that overdraft did not commence (or any prescriptive period become operative) until that temporary surplus ended. The temporary surplus, it is asserted, was the amount of water whose extraction from the basin would prevent waste in subsequent wet years by providing underground storage space in which rainfall in excess of the annual average could be stored for future use. It is not until this storage space has been provided and temporary surplus ended that plaintiff considers it proper to measure overdraft by safe yield.