> You don't take away rights, I don't even understand how you can tell someone they cannot access water.
What’s difficult to understand? Why should society be subsidizing these senior water rights holders? Nobody is saying they can’t access water, they should just fucking pay for it the same way the rest of the world does.
Society isn't paying subsidies to water rights holders. Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away. You can complain that it shouldn't be that way, but that is the legal reality.
> Water rights are property rights. Legally they can't just be taken away.
That's precisely eminent domain, "the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation."
They barely pay for it. Most of the people holding these rights pay an absurd fraction of what a city-dweller would pay for the same amount. That's the only reason it's profitable for the farmer.
They use different water systems. There is no single ‘water system’ or water source in the state. A senior rights holder has rights on a specific source of water.
Water itself is ‘free’ until there is no more - minus the infrastructure costs to get it where you want of course, which can be zero to insanely expensive depending on the source of water.
City dwellers are paying for the infrastructure to get clean, drinkable water to their doorstep at precise pressures 24/7 + any payments to water source rights owners.
Farmers are paying for bulk delivery of massive quantities of non-potable/drinkable water to their fields during specific times of the year.
Nah, thats just a completely revisionist history. All of these works projects were funded by federal dollars or city dollars, including the infrastructure to get it to the farmers. They pay a fraction of the delivery cost the cities pay. All the purification and recapture facilities are built and paid for on top of that. Western farmers have never, ever paid a fair price for the water they use.
That's bullshit, at least in California. Most of the problem water usage from Farmers, for example in the central and antelope valley, has been from private wells on private property they themselves sunk, or an equivalent small co-operative they were a member of did. They've been tapping huge underground fossil aquifers that way for nearly 100 years now, to the point it's been collapsing. No canals required. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence]
It's estimated the ground has permanently sunk ~ 28 ft. from this alone.
Before this started, the water table in the Antelope valley was at ground level in many places, with literal artesian springs popping up. It's now well over 2500 ft below ground level.
The Delta Mendota canal (finished in '51) was an extension and redo of a number of existing canals that were there far before. The army corp of engineers did a lot of the work then - but it wasn't that new. And this was all water just a few feet above sea-level and that would shortly become seawater if left unmolested.
Most of these original Canals from the Sierras existed before the concept of a state water organization existed. Some of them existed literally before the state did, and were from Spanish colonization/slavery. They weren't as mechanized or as large scale, but they were there.
It usually is not, depending on what you mean by ‘government’.
Even some of the large metropolises don’t get much water from state sources - San Francisco and the Bay Area for instance is almost exclusively using Water sources it purchased a long time ago. It’s why most of the hills east of Milpitas are private property of San Francisco Water, for instance. Most of the water that feeds LA, the city itself bought control over (and quite controversially so).
Often it is pumped from private wells on private land.
Often when it isn’t, it is part of large regional co-operatives of farmers, who buy land and then sink wells under it for water.
The rare times that isn’t the case, the ‘government’ is the local county water control board, not the state or feds.
The rate times THAT isn’t the case, it’s often overflow from flood control, or part of outflows from reservoirs built for flood control - where the water HAS to be let out or there will be flooding, depending on the season.
I’ve lived in California my entire life, and I’ve only gotten water from anything state owned on very, very rare occasions (aqueduct) and it’s terrible.
IANAL, so don't know the right words, but water in my jurisdiction has something like opportunity costs. Any water not used for agriculture or humans is available for fisheries, power generation, and habitat.
FYI, most hydropower and flood control dams have minimum flows they must sustain to avoid overtopping during spring flood seasons, and a maximum height they are allowed to store water at because of it. It's called the Exclusive Flood Control Storage Capacity.
If they can use that for power generation, it's 'free power' - they'd literally have to put it through the spillway instead of the turbines instead. That water also ends up in whatever farming areas can use it during that time too.
The issue of course is that weather is unpredictable, and if there ISN'T a flood, that was storage that could have been used for water for later. Either power, or crops, or drinking, etc.
What you're referring to I believe is prioritization of water - humans get x percent up to a certain cap, then the rest is fish and wildlife, or on demand power, etc.
That is what folks in the thread are generally referring to as 'water rights'.
What’s difficult to understand? Why should society be subsidizing these senior water rights holders? Nobody is saying they can’t access water, they should just fucking pay for it the same way the rest of the world does.