PFAS in Focus: Forever-Engineering With Trent Stober, HDR - Reflections on Water Podcast
On-Demand Webinar | Flood or Drought? A Discussion of the Election’s Potential Legislative Impacts on the Water Sector
[WEBINAR] Fairly (or Unfairly?) Traceable: Are Discharges Through Groundwater Subject to the Clean Water Act?
Water Rights with Eric Garner: Prescriptive Rights
Context is Crucial in Examining BLM’s Proposed Rule for Fracking On Federal Land
Farmers in southern Tulare County will face greater scrutiny for groundwater pumping after the state placed the region on probation following a lengthy hearing in Sacramento on Tuesday....more
A judge has temporarily blocked a plan by a California state water board to take over monitoring groundwater use in a portion of the crop-rich San Joaquin Valley, according to a copy of the decision obtained on July 16. Kings...more
What Happened? On June 21, 2024, the Supreme Court narrowly held that three states could not enter a consent decree to settle their interstate water dispute without the support of the intervening federal government. The...more
Republican attorneys general from 20 U.S. states sued the Biden administration on Tuesday, seeking to block new reforms to the U.S. environmental review process for major projects such as transmission lines and wind and solar...more
Update: The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) officially kicked off the Nooksack adjudication, a legal process that will determine the priority of water rights in Whatcom County and portions of Skagit County....more
The Alberta government has identified, and is taking proactive steps to address, the looming threat of a severe drought this year. As negotiations unfold to secure water-sharing agreements, a cascade of legal and economic...more
The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) announced it will begin an adjudication of water rights in Water Resources Inventory Area 1 (WRIA1), including the Nooksack River system, in April 2024. An adjudication is the...more
An ongoing, historic drought in California has compelled California state legislators to rethink the state’s long-standing treatment of water rights. While the recent heavy snowpack and wet spring and summer have alleviated...more
The California 2023 Legislative Session ended on September 14, 2023, and presented the Governor with several important changes to California’s water-related statutes. The Governor had until October 14, 2023, to sign all...more
California legislators have passed a bill articulating the scope of the State Water Resources Control Board’s authority to investigate water rights. Senate Bill 389, which will go to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk for a final...more
Last week, leaders from a range of industries convened for two days in Los Angeles for Brownstein and WestWater’s inaugural Sustainable Water Investment Summit....more
After nearly a decade, the Texas Attorney General and the New Mexico Attorney General announced in October 2022 that Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado had reached an agreement over the distribution of water from the Rio Grande;...more
How water rights are granted and managed in the United States has always been a challenge. Unlike land grants, which are finite areas, water knows no boundaries and flows freely. How water is distributed, managed, and...more
According to the National Center for Environmental Information, about 51 percent of the continental United States has been experiencing drought conditions in the summer of 2022. More than 70 percent of the western U.S. faces...more
A California Court of Appeal held that the EIR for a public water authority’s river diversion and water storage project adequately described the unadjudicated waters to be diverted and adequately analyzed impacts to water...more
As severe drought conditions continue across the western U.S., Allen Matkins will begin publishing a quarterly newsletter focused on recent legal, regulatory, and policy issues impacting water users and suppliers in...more
On March 22, 2022, the Second District Court of Appeal published its Opinion in Buena Vista Water Storage District v. Kern Water Bank Authority, upholding the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Kern Water Bank...more
On April 19, 2022, Clark County District Court Judge Bita Yeager issued a decision vacating the Nevada State Engineer’s (State Engineer) June 15, 2020, Order 1309. Under Order 1309, the State Engineer merged seven...more
On Feb. 23, 2022, the Third District Court of Appeal issued an opinion in Dow v. Lassen Irrigation Company et al, C091965 as to what it believed to be an issue of first impression—whether a watermaster appointed by the trial...more
In a landmark ruling signaling a new lens with which to view the treatment of interstate water allocation, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on November 22 in Mississippi v. Tennessee, et al., 595 U.S. ___ (Case No....more
In case you missed it while preparing for your Turkey dinner, on November 22, 2021, the United States Supreme Court decided 9-0 that the Equitable Apportionment Doctrine, which had prior to this decision been held to apply...more
The decision could complicate states’ ability to pursue groundwater natural resource damages actions. On November 22, 2021, the US Supreme Court held that equitable apportionment applies to a dispute between states about...more
On November 22, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Mississippi v. Tennessee, holding that water in an underground aquifer that flows across State lines is subject to equitable apportionment between the States, in similar...more
In August 2020 we previewed four notable interstate water rights cases that would soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The case of Mississippi v. Tennessee is now one step closer to a decision. On 5 November, 2020, the...more
In re Plains Pipeline, L.P., is a suit to adjudicate title to groundwater. Did the trial court err in allowing a party to drill seven test holes on a tank farm? (Spoiler alert: It didn’t.) This decision evaluates an order in...more