Court Opinion

ID: 9789117
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:28:17.655172+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:19.658267
License: Public Domain

Justice COATS,
concurring in the judgment only.
While I agree that the judgment of the water court must be reversed and its conditional decree vacated, I do not agree with the majority's rationale for doing so or its remand order. In my view, the water court's error lies less in the inadequacy of its findings than in its failure to distinguish the reasonable time requirement of the "can and will" test from the reasonableness of a municipality's growth projections for purposes of the anti-speculation doctrine. Although the majority acknowledges, at least in principle, the independence of the "can and will" standard, I fear that its explanation for reversing the judgment in this case can only perpetuate a fundamental misreading of Bijou and encourage governmental agencies and water courts alike to tie up the state's water resources with conditional decrees long beyond the time reasonably required to complete a particular project and actually put the resulting water to a beneficial use.
In City of Thornton v. Bijou Irrigation Co., 926 P.2d 1, 38-39 (Colo.1996), we clarified the scope of the governmental agency exception to the anti-speculation doctrine, holding that a municipality may be decreed conditional water rights without firm contractual commitments or agency relationships, but only to the extent of its reasonably anticipated requirements, based on substantiated projections of future growth. We also acknowledged the anti-speculation objective of the "can and will" statute and held that where speculation is not a real concern, the "can and will" test should not be applied to prevent on technical grounds an appropriation that would serve the goal of maximum utilization. Id. at 43 n. 31; see also Bd. of County Comm'rs of Arapahoe County v. United States, et al., 891 P.2d 952, 962 (Colo.1995). We nevertheless drew a clear distinction between the "can and will" standard and the anti-speculation doctrine and validated, even for governments, the separate "can and will" requirement that an applicant for a conditional water right establish a substantial probability that within a reasonable time the facilities necessary to effect the appropriation can and will be completed with diligence and the resulting waters applied to a beneficial use. Bijou, 926 P.2d at 42-43.
Perhaps because the applicant's satisfaction of the "can and will" test was challenged only as to various legal contingencies and the capacity of its proposed facilities, we did not more specifically address the "can and will" test's reasonable time requirement. By the same token, however, we clearly did not excuse municipalities from complying with it or equate it with a municipality's reasonable *321population projections. In context, we implicitly found it satisfied in Bijow only because of the complex cireumstances surrounding the decree in that case.
In particular, we took pains to note that Thornton already served a population of 78,-000 and that in addition to expected steady and substantial growth, the city's location downstream from other municipal and industrial users was resulting in a gradual deterioration of its water quality. Id. at 19. Its "Northern Project," which was the subject of the conditional decree, involved a complex interrelationship of water acquisition and distribution methods, including diversion, exchange, storage, augmentation, and physical transportation. Id. at 20. From an engineering perspective it required the utilization of a wide variety of structures and facilities, to be constructed incrementally, in carefully integrated phases, requiring some thirty to forty years for full implementation. Id. at 20-21. Legally, it involved four separate water right applications with statements of opposition by forty-nine parties, which had already involved some ten years of litigation by the time of our judgment. Id. at 21-22. We described the project as one of the largest municipal water projects to come before this court in recent memory. Id. at 19.
By contrast, virtually none of these complexities was present in the instant decree. By comparison with Thornton's Northern Project in Bijou, the population, engineering, and legal challenges faced by the applicants in this case seem almost trivial. As the testimony of its expert made clear, the application for a conditional decree of water rights that would not be needed, even by the applicant's projections, for nearly a century was not dictated in any way by the complexities of developing the water and making it available for use, but rather as a bid to preempt intervening appropriations for more immediate needs. On its face, such a practice is antithetical to the principle of maximum utilization in general, and the "can and will" statute in particular.
Onee all connection between the time needed to diligently develop a project for the beneficial utilization of water and a conditional decree for the right to use it has been severed, the fundamental justification for relating priorities back to a time predating actual appropriation is no longer applicable. The right of municipalities to lay claim to available waters for future needs (before their neighbors can do so) becomes limited only by their ability to reasonably predict population growth. Recognizing the open-endedness of such a rule, the majority, virtually without any serious attempt at justification, purports to presumptively limit conditional decrees to the time frame approved in Bijou. While the danger foreseen by the majority is real enough, I believe the solution rests in the continued vitality of the reasonable time requirement of the "can and will" test, even for governmental agencies.
Rather than imposing an arbitrary presumption about what is not (and apparently what is) a reasonable period for municipal conditional decrees, this court need only make clear that the "can and will" statute requires completion within a reasonable time, in light of the legal, engineering, and economic cireumstances of the project. Nothing in the anti-speculation exeeption for governmental agencies relieves municipalities of this additional requirement, excepting only that the anticipation of reasonable growth by municipalities is not considered speculation by the statute at all, and therefore municipal projects that would serve the goal of maximum utilization should not be thwarted by the "can and will" standard on technical grounds.
Because I believe the record in this case adequately demonstrates that the applicant failed to meet its burden under the "can and will" standard, and that remanding for further findings as the majority does will prove misleading about the actual requirements of that standard to both lower courts and concerned parties, I would simply reverse the judgment of the water court.