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> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally cons

> Abolish the water rights system and auction the water at a reasonable price. This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights. A good start would be to change the rules in order to make the rights much more transferable. By Coarse’s theorem that should get you to much the same place. The money going to ex-farmers forever is a tough pill to swallow but better that than the status quo.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
We have a very similar problem in Texas. A vast, vast majority of water use (something like 85-90%) in Central Texas is diverted to grow rice, an obviously completely unsustainable crop in Texas given the climate. The farmers, as in California, believe that since they were there first they are entitled to the water and fight tooth and nail any time that someone threatens their usage. Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I’m not an expert on the subject but I don’t think Texas is in as much of a bind as California. There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western). There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult. Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
  - thechao 5y ago
    A lot of us in the hills around Austin are putting in rooftop rainwater systems — we expect at-the-well metering in the next 10 years. Most of us are on grades, and a 1500’ footprint lets you put in 20k gallon system under the house — that amortizes to about 4 months of water, depending the family size. Shipping water from LBJ is a cheap stopgap.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  My impression was that rice cultivation in TX was started by the Japanese around Beaumont. Is the situation with water or irrigation any better over there? Edit: TIL about William Goyens http://mms.winnsboroisd.org/ourpages/auto/2015/1/16/60439582/William%20Goyens.pdf http://mms.winnsboroisd.org/ourpages/auto/2015/1/16/60439582...
mschuster91 5y ago
> This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights. Re-nationalize them or at the very least make them expire in 10 to 20 years. The current developments are serious enough to justify taking these "rights" away.
- thenewwazoo 5y ago
  Sure that’s the right plan but who’s going to do it? Remember that there is no Left in the USA.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  Under current case law if you nationalized (state-ized?) water rights in a prior appropriation state it would be a kind of eminent domain and there’d have to be compensation.
  - bnjms 5y ago
    Eminent domain followed by an automatic lease for the value of the rights over whatever period these things are valued at? Would that work? Farmers could quit farming and sell their rights by the year.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      I don’t follow the automatic lease part of your proposal, sorry.
      - bnjms 5y ago
        To avoid having to directly pay out to the owners of the property the state can lease the water rights back to the farmers. This way everyone’s unhappy but we escape the status quo and aging farmers could live off the water rights.
        bradleyjg 5y ago
theptip 5y ago
Agreed, if it was easy it would have been done already. I’d be interested in case studies comparing the implementation details from other countries that shad to face this challenges earlier (eg Australia). Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good. I would say that while I think a market on water prices would fix the problems with wasteful usages, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to support a market on water rights allocation, since there are other uses other than agriculture. But maybe the transfer liberalization program you suggest would just be within existing agricultural uses? I did see an article a while back that was discussing micro-metering which allowed farmers to sell slices of their allocation - seems like there is a technical challenge here as well. I expect the actual process of water right reforms in CA will be messy and tilt mostly towards the farmers, as there is no focused special interest group to fund lobbyists against theirs.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good. It’s not a matter of what I think ought to be the case or ought to have happened. It’s how to solve the problem at hand given the legal constraints that exist. It’s possible those precedents could be overturned and open up the policy space, but given the current make up of the Supreme Court I think that’s unlikely to happen in the next few decades.
  - theptip 5y ago
    It seems that you’re making a claim about what policies are possible; I don’t have enough domain knowledge here to disagree. My point was just that If most voters are opposed to your solution, it won’t happen - even if that means nothing happens and we maintain the broken status quo - regardless of whether it is the only way forward within our current legal framework. In other words, noting that while it sounds viable from a raw economics perspective, it might hit problems with voter acceptability. And voters do care about what “aught to have happened”, for better or worse.
watersb 5y ago
We had a Problem out here in central New Mexico, a foreign investor (external to US, I think it was people in Italy) sought permits to drill very deep wells. At the time, the state of New Mexico technically stopped water rights at some crazy depth, like 3000 feet or more, but anything beyond that was unregulated. This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, tailor-made for the ranchers and farmers who control the water. I will try to dig up references... But just like T. Boone Pickens buying up water rights in Texas, open markets for water don't solve the fact that the American West is out of water, and no amount of legal entitlement is going to create any.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  There’s enough water for everything except agriculture. Local governments hide the ball on this, talking about toilets, pools, and even glasses of drinking water in restaurants but it’s almost entirely agricultural. To the great-grandparent poster’s point not even mostly high value agriculture like almonds but barely-profitable-even-with-free-water alfalfa agriculture. The status quo is insane and is exactly the sort of thing that could be fixed by a price mechanism. People get scared because they think that they aren’t going to be able to flush their toilets, but water is priced in acre-feet. Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals.
  - watersb 5y ago
    > Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals. Like radio spectrum bandwidth, a limited resource. Unlike bandwidth, availability is not fixed or guaranteed, and no human agency can make it so. I have written pages of stuff, trying sort this out. I don't see how a market can create water. In the Dust Bowl, ranchers were given a fixed price for each head of livestock, slaughtered the cattle. It was a shock, a sudden phase change, and smallholders were bankrupt. But even then, the state didn't sell water futures: they liquidated the cattle. They didn't claim the water would return.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago

We have a very similar problem in Texas. A vast, vast majority of water use (something like 85-90%) in Central Texas is diverted to grow rice, an obviously completely unsustainable crop in Texas given the climate. The farmers, as in California, believe that since they were there first they are entitled to the water and fight tooth and nail any time that someone threatens their usage. Perhaps some agreement that made the water rights expire on death of the farmer would be a compromise that no one would be happy with but possibly stomachable for everyone. Farmers would not get to ensure the livelihood of their children and the rest of Texas would have to wait 40 years, but it could be done without disrupting the current status quo too much.

bradleyjg 5y ago
I’m not an expert on the subject but I don’t think Texas is in as much of a bind as California. There are two main water regulation systems in the US: riparian (eastern) and prior appropriation (western). There’s are lots of variations and details but at a very high level the riparian system does not create vested property rights in water and so can be freely tweaked by the government. Prior appropriation, on the other hand, does create vested property rights which are then protected by the 14th amendment. This makes reform much more difficult. Texas, being Texas, has an oddball hybrid system. My understanding is that it uses prior appropriation as an allocation method but riparian (state ownership) as a theoretical underpinning. Thus the Texas government should be able to modify the system without running afoul of the 14th amendment.
- thechao 5y ago
  A lot of us in the hills around Austin are putting in rooftop rainwater systems — we expect at-the-well metering in the next 10 years. Most of us are on grades, and a 1500’ footprint lets you put in 20k gallon system under the house — that amortizes to about 4 months of water, depending the family size. Shipping water from LBJ is a cheap stopgap.
selimthegrim 5y ago
My impression was that rice cultivation in TX was started by the Japanese around Beaumont. Is the situation with water or irrigation any better over there? Edit: TIL about William Goyens http://mms.winnsboroisd.org/ourpages/auto/2015/1/16/60439582/William%20Goyens.pdf http://mms.winnsboroisd.org/ourpages/auto/2015/1/16/60439582...

mschuster91 5y ago

> This is a good idea but tough to do. Prior appropriation claims are legally considered vested property rights. Re-nationalize them or at the very least make them expire in 10 to 20 years. The current developments are serious enough to justify taking these "rights" away.

thenewwazoo 5y ago
Sure that’s the right plan but who’s going to do it? Remember that there is no Left in the USA.
bradleyjg 5y ago
Under current case law if you nationalized (state-ized?) water rights in a prior appropriation state it would be a kind of eminent domain and there’d have to be compensation.
- bnjms 5y ago
  Eminent domain followed by an automatic lease for the value of the rights over whatever period these things are valued at? Would that work? Farmers could quit farming and sell their rights by the year.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    I don’t follow the automatic lease part of your proposal, sorry.
    - bnjms 5y ago
      To avoid having to directly pay out to the owners of the property the state can lease the water rights back to the farmers. This way everyone’s unhappy but we escape the status quo and aging farmers could live off the water rights.
      - bradleyjg 5y ago

theptip 5y ago

Agreed, if it was easy it would have been done already. I’d be interested in case studies comparing the implementation details from other countries that shad to face this challenges earlier (eg Australia). Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good. I would say that while I think a market on water prices would fix the problems with wasteful usages, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to support a market on water rights allocation, since there are other uses other than agriculture. But maybe the transfer liberalization program you suggest would just be within existing agricultural uses? I did see an article a while back that was discussing micro-metering which allowed farmers to sell slices of their allocation - seems like there is a technical challenge here as well. I expect the actual process of water right reforms in CA will be messy and tilt mostly towards the farmers, as there is no focused special interest group to fund lobbyists against theirs.

bradleyjg 5y ago
Regarding your concrete proposal - that seems like a purely free-market proposal that accepts that farmers should be able to capture all of the value from appreciation in their water rights over time. I imagine that would be politically difficult; at the other end of the spectrum is to say that the water rights should never have been sold and that it is a public good. It’s not a matter of what I think ought to be the case or ought to have happened. It’s how to solve the problem at hand given the legal constraints that exist. It’s possible those precedents could be overturned and open up the policy space, but given the current make up of the Supreme Court I think that’s unlikely to happen in the next few decades.
- theptip 5y ago
  It seems that you’re making a claim about what policies are possible; I don’t have enough domain knowledge here to disagree. My point was just that If most voters are opposed to your solution, it won’t happen - even if that means nothing happens and we maintain the broken status quo - regardless of whether it is the only way forward within our current legal framework. In other words, noting that while it sounds viable from a raw economics perspective, it might hit problems with voter acceptability. And voters do care about what “aught to have happened”, for better or worse.

watersb 5y ago

We had a Problem out here in central New Mexico, a foreign investor (external to US, I think it was people in Italy) sought permits to drill very deep wells. At the time, the state of New Mexico technically stopped water rights at some crazy depth, like 3000 feet or more, but anything beyond that was unregulated. This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, tailor-made for the ranchers and farmers who control the water. I will try to dig up references... But just like T. Boone Pickens buying up water rights in Texas, open markets for water don't solve the fact that the American West is out of water, and no amount of legal entitlement is going to create any.

bradleyjg 5y ago
There’s enough water for everything except agriculture. Local governments hide the ball on this, talking about toilets, pools, and even glasses of drinking water in restaurants but it’s almost entirely agricultural. To the great-grandparent poster’s point not even mostly high value agriculture like almonds but barely-profitable-even-with-free-water alfalfa agriculture. The status quo is insane and is exactly the sort of thing that could be fixed by a price mechanism. People get scared because they think that they aren’t going to be able to flush their toilets, but water is priced in acre-feet. Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals.
- watersb 5y ago
  > Any personal use will easily outbid agriculture without being at all noticeable to even poor individuals. Like radio spectrum bandwidth, a limited resource. Unlike bandwidth, availability is not fixed or guaranteed, and no human agency can make it so. I have written pages of stuff, trying sort this out. I don't see how a market can create water. In the Dust Bowl, ranchers were given a fixed price for each head of livestock, slaughtered the cattle. It was a shock, a sudden phase change, and smallholders were bankrupt. But even then, the state didn't sell water futures: they liquidated the cattle. They didn't claim the water would return.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago