Court Opinion

ID: 9856997
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 07:10:12.277835+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:37:49.229509
License: Public Domain

JOHNSON, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. In my view, the district court correctly resolved the issues discussed in the Court’s opinion issued following reargument of the conjunctive management issue and rehearing of the irrigation season issue.
In the portion of its order that resolved the conjunctive management issue, the district court said:
Findings on the nature and extent of the interconnection in order to determine the impact of one right on another, is a determination reserved for the time when a call is made on a source or where the Director determines, as a part of his statutory duties, to administer conjunctively. The varying degrees of interconnection may be determined by resolving such issues as the timing and amount of impacts, distances, local hydrology, aquifer characteristics, spatial variation, groundwater levels, hydraulic gradients, aquifer boundaries, confining layers, stream bed hydraulic conductivity and the timing and amount of return flows. Then the issue of how to respond to a call or the necessity and manner of IDWR conjunctive administration may be resolved by the Department. These are not issues necessary to determine the statutory elements of a water right; or if they *426may be, cannot be decreed as a general provision.
In the portion of its order that resolved the irrigation season issue, the district court said:
[T]he period of use for irrigation is the irrigation season, unless a specific time period for irrigation is proved. The irrigation season is determined, in the first instance, by the honest determination of the irrigator as to when water is needed and can be beneficially used for that purpose. Nevertheless, no irrigator has the right to waste water by irrigating prior to or after the irrigation season and the law places the duty and authority to circumscribe wasteful uses with the Director of the Department of Water Resources. Unless proved otherwise, the period of use for irrigation is the irrigation season, and it is an administrative function vested in the sound discretion of the Director to ensure that irrigators do not waste water by putting it to use before or after the irrigation season.
In the SRBA, the proposed general provisions for early and late season irrigation recognize the reality that the period of use for irrigation varies from year to year and region to region in the State of Idaho. The need for this general provision exists because a fixed time period for the season of use does not reflect reality nor can it be proved with the certainty required for a decree which will have application in perpetuity. The Director clearly recognizes this problem.
The solution to the problem is not to exacerbate it by continuing to adhere to the fiction that the irrigation season can be decreed as a fixed period. The proper solution and the one required as a matter of law, is that in the SRBA all irrigation rights shall be decreed with one and the same period of use: the irrigation season. There is no necessity for the court to enter general provisions for early and late season use. The water users may determine, in the first instance, the beginning and ending dates of the irrigation season. However, under his duty and authority, the Director of IDWR, may, by adopting rules and regulations based on all the facts required, set the irrigation season on an annual basis.
I would affirm the district court’s decision on each of these issues.