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Water rights fight won’t end soon; Rancher won ruling against Forest Service, but appeal is likely

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 21, 2008 at 5:51 am

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

It took 17 years for the late rancher Wayne Hage to win a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service in a long-running dispute over property rights, water rights and grazing on federal land. A federal judge finally ruled last month that the government had engaged in an unconstitutional “taking” of Hage’s water rights and awarded more than $4 million to Hage’s estate. His family and supporters, while relishing the victory, fear the fight is far from won.

“What happened to us in the 1980s and 1990s is now happening across the West, so it is going to be vitally important for Western ranchers to understand what they own and how to defend it,” said Ramona Morrison, one of Hage’s daughters. A member of the Nevada State Agriculture Board, she was a freshman in high school when the dispute began.

“We could have a classic case here in some sense of laws working at cross purposes,” said Ed Monnig, U.S. Forest Service supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyable National Forest where Hage once grazed his cattle in central Nevada.

Federal Claims Court Judge Loren Smith, based in Washington D.C., ruled that government restrictions severely reducing water flows to the Hage family’s land “deprived them of the water they needed for irrigation, making the ranch unviable.”

Like judges before him, Smith said the cancellation of Hage’s grazing permit as a result of overgrazing and trespassing did not constitute a “taking” prohibited under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, because a grazing permit is “a license, not a contract or property interest,” he said. But he concluded the government committed a taking when the Forest Service, apparently motivated by “hostility” toward Hage, made it impossible for him to maintain irrigation ditches.

“It doesn’t do you a lot of good to own that water if you really, effectively can’t use it,” said Lyman Bedford, a San Francisco-based lawyer who has argued the case since Hage filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service in 1991.

Read the rest of this story from the Las Vegas Review-Journal by clicking here.

July 21, 2008 · Filed Under Water Rights

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