Opinion ID: 1253871
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: do federal reserved rights extend to groundwater?

Text: ¶ 15 Moving from background to foreground, we consider the trial court's conclusion that the reserved water rights of federal claimantswhen measured by federal substantive laware not constrained by Arizona's bifurcated treatment of surface water and groundwater. According to the trial court, federal law establishes a reserved right to groundwater, if and to the extent that groundwater may be necessary to accomplish the purpose of a federal reservation. ¶ 16 The state law parties respond that the Supreme Court has never applied reserved rights to groundwater and that this court, if not obliged to do so, should decline to apply a federal doctrine so disjunctive to established doctrines of our state. In support of this argument, the state law parties cite the example of In re All Rights to Use Water in the Big Horn River System, 753 P.2d 76 (Wyo.1988). In that general stream adjudication, the Supreme Court of Wyoming recognized that [t]he logic which supports a reservation of surface water to fulfill the purpose of the reservation also supports reservation of groundwater. Id. at 99. Yet the court declined to find a reserved right to groundwater, stating in explanation only that it had been cited no previous decision which did so. Id. at 99-100. [6] ¶ 17 We can appreciate the hesitation of the Big Horn court to break new ground, but we do not find its reasoning persuasive. That no previous court has come to grips with an issue does not relieve a present court, fairly confronted with the issue, of the obligation to do so. Moreover, as the Big Horn court acknowledged, we do not write on a blank slate. ¶ 18 The reserved rights doctrine derives from Winters v. United States, 207 U.S. 564, 28 S.Ct. 207, 52 L.Ed. 340 (1908). There, the United States sued to enjoin upstream settlers in Montana from constructing or maintaining dams and reservoirs that diverted Milk River waters from flowing to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. Id. at 565, 28 S.Ct. 207. Although the reservation was created in 1888, before the upstream settlers arrived, the settlers claimed priority under Montana's law of prior appropriation, asserting that their diversion and beneficial use preceded all but a minor appropriation of waters for reservation use. Id. at 568-69, 28 S.Ct. 207. The Supreme Court rejected the settlers' argument. Observing that [t]he power of the government to reserve the waters and exempt them from appropriation under the state laws is not denied, and could not be, the Court concluded that, in setting aside land for a reservation, the government had implicitly reserved sufficient water to accomplish the reservation's purpose. Id. at 577, 28 S.Ct. 207. ¶ 19 In Cappaert, the Court applied the reserved rights doctrine in a case that turned on the hydrological connection of surface water and groundwater. There, upon application by the United States, a federal district court had issued, and the Ninth Circuit had affirmed, an injunction restricting pumping from wells drilled on private ranch land bordering the Devil's Hole National Monument. The wells drew water from the same underground source as a pool within the monument where lived an endangered breed of fish. One purpose of the monument was to preserve the pool and its rare fish. Id. at 141, 96 S.Ct. 2062. Upon evidence that pumping from the wells had lowered the pool's surface to a level that inhibited the spawning of the fish, the Supreme Court affirmed the district court's injunction, which restricted the ranch's pumping to the extent necessary to maintain the pool at a water level that sufficed to support the fish. Id. ¶ 20 Although the Ninth Circuit, in its Cappaert opinion, expressly determined that the reserved rights doctrine extends to groundwater, [7] the Supreme Court found it unnecessary to reach that question, explaining that the water in the pool was surface water. Cappaert, 426 U.S. at 142, 96 S.Ct. 2062. Yet upon evidence that federal water rights were being depleted because ... the `[g]roundwater and surface water are physically interrelated as integral parts of the hydrologic cycle,' the Court held that the United States can protect its water from subsequent diversion, whether the diversion is of surface or groundwater. Id. at 142-43, 96 S.Ct. 2062 ( quoting C. Corker, Groundwater Law, Management and Administration, National Water Commission Legal Study No. 6, p. xxiv (1971)). ¶ 21 In Cappaert, as before, the Supreme Court left the question of a reserved right to groundwater unresolved. The Court's decisions, however, provide guideposts toward our holding that such a right exists. ¶ 22 We find one guidepost in Winters, where the Court stressed that the arid lands of the Fort Belknap Reservation could not be made inhabitable and capable of growing crops without an implicit reservation of Milk River waters. Winters, 207 U.S. at 569, 28 S.Ct. 207. We find a similar guidepost in Arizona v. California , where the Court declared it impossible to believe that those who created the Colorado River Indian Reservation were unaware that most of the lands were of the desert kindhot, scorching sandsand that water from the [Colorado River and its tributaries] would be essential to the life of the Indian people and to the animals they hunted and the crops they raised. Arizona v. California, 373 U.S. at 599, 83 S.Ct. 1468. The reservations considered in those cases depended for their water on perennial streams. But some reservations lack perennial streams and depend for present or future survival substantially or entirely upon pumping of underground water. We find it no more thinkable in the latter circumstance than in the former that the United States reserved land for habitation without reserving the water necessary to sustain life. ¶ 23 We find another guidepost to decision in the Supreme Court's association of surface and groundwater in Cappaert as integral parts of the hydrologic cycle. Cappaert, 426 U.S. at 142, 96 S.Ct. 2062. True, the Court identified the waters to be protected as the surface waters of the pool in Devil's Hole. But in contrast to prior cases where the use to be enjoined was an upstream diversion of surface waters, in Cappaert the use to be enjoined was a pumping of groundwater from beneath adjoining land. The Court declined to differentiate one means of diversion from another. Instead, the Court held that the United States can protect its water from subsequent diversion, whether the diversion is of surface or groundwater. Id. at 143, 96 S.Ct. 2062. While Cappaert bears most directly upon our discussion of issue 5 in Part IV of this opinion, we find it helpful to our resolution of the present issue as well. That federal reserved rights law declines to differentiate surface and groundwaterthat it recognizes them as integral parts of a hydrologic cyclewhen addressing the diversion of protected waters suggests that federal reserved rights law would similarly decline to differentiate surface and groundwater when identifying the water to be protected. ¶ 24 In summary, the cases we have cited lead us to conclude that if the United States implicitly intended, when it established reservations, to reserve sufficient unappropriated water to meet the reservations' needs, it must have intended that reservation of water to come from whatever particular sources each reservation had at hand. The significant question for the purpose of the reserved rights doctrine is not whether the water runs above or below the ground but whether it is necessary to accomplish the purpose of the reservation. ¶ 25 The state law parties argue, however, that even if the reserved rights doctrine applies equally in principle to groundwater as to surface water, we should decline to extend the doctrine to groundwater out of deference to state water law. Where federal rights are at issue, a state court may adopt state law as the rule of decision if to do so would not frustrate or impair a federal purpose. See United States v. Kimbell Foods, Inc., 440 U.S. 715, 728-29, 99 S.Ct. 1448, 59 L.Ed.2d 711 (1979). Such is not the case here. To the contrary, the Supreme Court has defined the reserved rights doctrine as an exception to Congress's deference to state water law. See United States v. New Mexico, 438 U.S. 696, 714, 98 S.Ct. 3012, 57 L.Ed.2d 1052 (1978); accord Cappaert, 426 U.S. at 145, 96 S.Ct. 2062; see also United States v. Rio Grande Dam & Irrig. Co., 174 U.S. 690, 703, 19 S.Ct. 770, 43 L.Ed. 1136 (1899) (state law cannot be applied to destroy the federal government's right to water on its lands). [8] ¶ 26 In Winters, the Supreme Court acknowledged the extensive cultivation, construction, and development that Montana settlers had undertaken in reliance upon diversions of water accomplished pursuant to state law. 207 U.S. at 569-70, 28 S.Ct. 207. Had the Court deferred to state law, the settlers would have prevailed. Instead, the Court concluded that the United States had exercised its power to reserve the waters and exempt them from appropriation under the state laws. Id. at 577, 28 S.Ct. 207. In Cappaert, similarly, the Court acknowledged the extensive investment that the ranch land parties had made and the substantial employment generated by their wells. 426 U.S. at 133, 96 S.Ct. 2062. The State Engineer, applying state law, had permitted the pumping to continue, finding in part that further economic development served the public interest. Id. at 134-35, 96 S.Ct. 2062. The Supreme Court, however, concluded that determination of reserved water rights is not governed by state law but derives from the federal purpose of the reservation. Id. at 145, 96 S.Ct. 2062. ¶ 27 It is apparent from the case law that we may not withhold application of the reserved rights doctrine purely out of deference to state law. Rather, we may not defer to state law where to do so would defeat federal water rights. ¶ 28 The state law parties next argue, however, that deference to state law in this case would not defeat federal water rights. Specifically, they maintain that there has never been a need to reserve groundwater in a state that provides all overlying landowners an equal right to pump as much groundwater as they can put to reasonable use upon their land. [9] Cf. Wilson v. Omaha Indian Tribe, 442 U.S. 653, 674, 99 S.Ct. 2529, 61 L.Ed.2d 153 (1979) (court may borrow state law as rule of decision where under the circumstances there is no reason for beneficiaries of a federal right to have a privileged position over others). ¶ 29 This argument, however, overlooks that federal reserved water rights are by nature a preserve intended to continue[ ] through years. See Winters, 207 U.S. at 577, 28 S.Ct. 207. In Arizona v. California , the Supreme Court affirmed that an implied reservation includes sufficient waters to satisfy the future as well as the present needs of the Indian Reservations. Arizona v. California, 373 U.S. at 600, 83 S.Ct. 1468. The Court added that the reservation of waters applies to the future requirements of other types of federal reservation as well. Id. at 601, 83 S.Ct. 1468. A theoretically equal right to pump groundwater, in contrast to a reserved right, would not protect a federal reservation from a total future depletion of its underlying aquifer by off-reservation pumpers. Cf. Washington v. Washington State Com. Passenger Fishing Vessel Ass'n, 443 U.S. 658, 676 n. 22, 99 S.Ct. 3055, 61 L.Ed.2d 823 (1979) ([I]n light of the far superior numbers, capital resources, and technology of the non-Indians, the concept of the Indians' `equal opportunity ' to take advantage of a scarce resource is likely in practice to mean that the Indians' `right of taking fish' will net them virtually no catch at all.) ¶ 30 Under the reasonable use doctrine, Arizona has consumed far more groundwater than nature can replenish. See ARIZONA DEP'T WATER RESOURCES, ARIZONA WATER RESOURCES ASSESSMENT: VOL. 1, INVENTORY AND ANALYSIS 9 (1994); Philip R. Higdon & Terence W. Thompson, The 1980 Arizona Groundwater Management Code, 1980 Ariz. St. L.J. 621, 623. The Department of Water Resources presented evidence to the trial court in this case of streams in transition from perennial to intermittent within the San Pedro and Upper San Pedro watersheds, of others nearing an ephemeral character, and of others in geographical retreat. See ARIZONA DEP'T WATER RESOURCES, GILA RIVER SYSTEM GROUNDWATER-SURFACE WATER INTERACTION STUDY 31-32 (1987). Within the Lower Gila River watershed, groundwater tables have been so lowered as to sever the connection between ground and surface water. See Leshy & Belanger, supra, at 665-66. Some Indian reservations have been entirely dewatered by off-reservation pumping. See Gila River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community v. United States, 9 Cl.Ct. 660, 665-66 (1986) (federal inaction and lack of tribal resources have enabled off-reservation developers to pump aquifers underlying some Indian reservations dry before the tribes could exercise their opportunity to pump groundwater). We therefore cannot conclude that deference to Arizona's lawand to the opportunity it extends all landholders to pump as much groundwater as they can reasonably use would adequately serve to protect federal rights. ¶ 31 For the foregoing reasons, we hold that the trial court correctly determined that the federal reserved water rights doctrine applies not only to surface water but to groundwater. We decide this issue in the abstract at this time as a necessary step in determining the scope of interests to be encompassed by this adjudication. We do not, however, decide that any particular federal reservation, Indian or otherwise, has a reserved right to groundwater. A reserved right to groundwater may only be found where other waters are inadequate to accomplish the purpose of a reservation. To determine the purpose of a reservation and to determine the waters necessary to accomplish that purpose are inevitably fact-intensive inquiries that must be made on a reservation-by-reservation basis. See United States v. New Mexico, 438 U.S. at 700, 98 S.Ct. 3012. ¶ 32 Likewise, we do not now attempt to impose a standard upon the trial court for determining the purpose of any reservation. That standard, in our judgment, is not well-suited to abstract declaration and should instead emerge from testing in the solid context of the facts. [10]