Court Opinion

ID: 9628348
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:17:33.074696+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:05:24.474341
License: Public Domain

McCLINTOCK, Justice,
specially concurring, with whom ROSE, Justice, joins.
I concur in the disposition of the case as set forth in the opinion of Mr. Justice Guthrie, Retired, but would like to add these special comments.
Perhaps there are good engineering reasons why it is better irrigation practice to take water out of its natural underground storage where its continued presence is fairly assured, and to put it into op,en storage where it is subject not only to seepage but to evaporation loss. Perhaps, just as it is necessary to have stored water available for municipal use so that there can be a definite and dependable supply to the users thereof, such surface concentration is necessary in the situation of the irrigation district. I probably should not have the temerity to raise the question since it is a technical one of fact, which appears to have been settled by the decision of the board of control.
I would emphasize, however, that my concurrence in the disposition this day made is based on the understanding that the district is not being given carte blanche to pump and store underground water during the months fixed and to the numerical limit fixed if it should be later demonstrated as a matter of fact that such pumping and storage are taking water from the aquifer, the continued presence of which therein is necessary to assure to earlier appropriators, such as Meier, the full beneficial use of their own underground water rights.
Pumping underground water to the surface and then storing the same in surface reservoirs is hardly the same thing as diverting and storing the spring runoff of streams which, if not stored, will continue to carry away water which might very well be used at a later date but cannot be used at that time. I look upon an underground water reservoir as a supply of water which *1291must continually be replenished. Ordinarily, this would occur in the late winter and summer months whén the melting snows sink into the ground and tend to fill the underground reservoir. This water will then be available to existing appropriators thereof under our underground water laws at a time when it is needed for application to the ground, which is the only real beneficial use. Storage is not in itself an end constituting such beneficial use. If the water which is replenishing the underground reservoir is removed therefrom as quickly as it comes into the reservoir, then it follows that those appropriators whose rights are senior to the district’s may find, when the occasion arises for them to want the water, that it is then resting in the district’s surface reservoirs, subject to further seepage and evaporation. It is not the purpose of our underground water law to permit the junior appropriator to divert the same from the appropriator who has the prior right.
I believe that the water authorities of the state have that problem in mind and construing the order of the board of control and the affirmance thereof by this court as making no blanket allowance to the district, I concur in' the affirmance.