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Nevada rancher awarded $4.2 million; Forest Service took his water rights, judge says

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 11, 2008 at 5:50 am

From the Los Angeles Times:

A federal judge has awarded more than $4.2 million to the estate of late Nevada rancher and private property rights advocate Wayne Hage, ruling that the U.S. Forest Service committed a constitutional “taking” of his water rights during a decades-long dispute over livestock grazing on federal land. Calling the conflict a “drama worthy of a tragic opera and heroic characters,” U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Loren A. Smith also ordered the government to pay back interest to the family of one of the leaders of the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion” during the 1980s.

Hage’s lawyer estimates the interest dating to 1991 to be an additional $4.4 million, which he said would make it the largest award ever in such a case. “It sends a pretty important message to the government that if you screw with a small ranching family and put them out of business, you have to pay big bucks,” said Lyman “Ladd” Bedford, a San Francisco-based lawyer who has argued the case since Hage first filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service in 1991.

Smith, based in Washington D.C., ruled that government restrictions severely reducing water flows to Hage’s land “deprived them of the water they needed for irrigation, making the ranch unviable.” “The court finds the government’s actions had a severe economic impact on plaintiffs and the governments’ actions rose to the level of a taking,” he said in Friday’s ruling. “Whereas real property ownership is defined by a right to exclude others from that property, water ownership is defined by the right to access and use that water.”

Like in similar cases in the past, the judge said the cancellation of Hage’s federal grazing permit as a result of overgrazing and trespassing did not in itself amount to a “taking” prohibited under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. That’s because a grazing permit is “a license, not a contract or property interest,” he said. However, Smith said the taking occurred when the Forest Service — apparently motivated by “hostility” toward Hage — made it impossible for him to maintain the irrigation ditches.

Read the rest of this story from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.

June 11, 2008 · Filed Under Water Rights

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